Saturday, June 11, 2011

Humble Pie or how my scattered scattered brain works...

So. After finding out that I too have been not tying my shoelaces properly  I was scrolling down my facebook page where I happened upon this headline: A battered Germany recovers from E. coli outbreak 
Salad is back on the menu in Germany , but it's being served with a big helping of humble pie. 

At first I wanted to share this link along with some kind of witty remark related to how hard it must be for Germans to eat humble pie, but instead I looked up the term "humble pie".  It turns out the term has a very interesting etymology:

The expression derives from umble pie, which was a pie filled with liverheart and other offal, especially of cow but often deer or boarUmble evolved from numble, (after the French nomble) meaning 'deer's innards'.[1][2] Umbles were considered inferior food; in medieval times the pie was often served to lower-class people.[3]
Although "umbles" and the modern word "humble" are etymologically unrelated, each word has appeared both with and without the initial "h" after the Middle Ages until the 19th century. Since the sound "h" is often dropped in many dialects, and "umble" was a humble meal anyway, the phrase was rebracketed as "humble pie".[citation needed] While "umble" is now gone from the language, the phrase remains, carrying the fossilized word as an idiom
And it turns out that: "Umble pie in its literal sense is a filled pastry similar in many respects to a Cornish pasty." which of course made me think of one of my favorite places --Michigan's Upper Peninsula--where pasties are a part of the local cuisine: see the cuisine section of the wikipedia UP entry...
Now I have to go back and read the original article...

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