Grammar Girl here.
It's the time of year for family gatherings, roasted turkey and setting a beautiful table with all your finest tableware.
So today we're going to look at all the fascinating and sometimes scandalous histories behind the very implements you'll be using to serve and enjoy your Thanksgiving feast if you're in the United States.
Forks, spoons, knives, ladles, saucers, and chargers.
I started out looking at the etymology of these words, but the history was too fun not to share.
First, picture this.
It's Venice in the year 1004 and a Byzantine princess, who was probably named Maria Aeropoliana, arrives for her wedding to Giovanni Orsiolo, son of the Doge of Venice, carrying a case of golden two-pronged forks.
And at the wedding feast she ate with one which absolutely scandalized the Venetian guests, because in those days everyone ate with their hands.
Local clergy condemned her for this shocking display of decadence, with some accounts saying a priest declared that quote God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks his fingers.
Therefore it is an insult to him to substitute artificial metal forks for them when eating unquote.
Just two years later, the plague came to Venice and killed the princess, and Saint Peter Damian eventually proclaimed it was divine punishment for her lavish lifestyle, such as using a fork.
According to Edam Online, the word fork came into Old English from a Latin word describing a two-pronged fork for cooking or a pitchfork.
And this connection to pitchforks would haunt the fork for centuries, because its pronged design made many people think of the devil's infernal tool.
But forks had actually been around for a long time before the Byzantine princess shocked Venice, just not in Europe.
The earliest known forks were discovered in China, made from bone during the Bronze Age.
Ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all had large forks, but they used them as cooking utensils for lifting meat from boiling pots, not for eating.
The innovation of the Byzantine Empire was likely the personal use of forks at the table, and doing so was common there and in the Middle East by the princess's time.
After the fork made its way to Venice by way of marriage, the fork slowly spread through Italy, where it proved especially useful for eating pasta.
Those prongs were perfect for gathering slippery noodles.
Personal forks were common in Italy by the 1300s and, although there's not rock-hard evidence, one popular story is that Catherine de' Medici brought Italian forks to France when she married Henry II in 1533, introducing them to the French court.
Now it's possible she just popularized the fork instead of actually introducing it.
But either way, fork use was again spreading through marriage.
People also initially rejected the fork in England, especially men.
For example, in 1611, English traveler Thomas Corriate published accounts of seeing people using forks in Italy, and he was initially ridiculed for promoting this unmanly Italian affectation.
But as they did elsewhere, forks eventually prevailed.
And, according to National Geographic, by the 1800s, forks were standard in Britain and in parts of America.
Now, unlike the scandalous fork, knives are humanity's oldest eating implements.
In fact, they're among humanity's oldest tools, period.
Knives date back about 2.5 million years to sharpened stones and flints used as weapons and tools.
And by 1000 BC we had iron knives that were attached to handles and could be honed to be quite sharp.
But here's where the knife gets interesting for table manners.
For most of history, everyone had their own personal knife that they kept in a sheath on their belt.
These knives had pointed blades for sparing food and were also used as weapons.
But there was a manners issue.
People would bring their own knife to dinner, use it to stab chunks of meat and then use that same sharp point to pick their teeth.
Enter Cardinal Richelieu of France, founder of the French Academy and a powerful statesman who served King Louis XIII.
An oft-repeated story is that around 1637, Richelieu became irritated by the brutish table manners of his dinner guests, particularly this picking teeth with knives thing.
He ordered his household knives to have their blades dulled and their tips rounded off.
Now, because Richelieu was famous and feared.
The practice caught on and French households copied the idea to be thought of as fashionable and well-mannered.
But it was King Louis XIV who really made the change official.
In 1669 he banned pointed knives in his Flemish regions, particularly targeting table knives and weapons carried in public, calling for sharp tips of existing knives to be rounded off.
His reasoning was partly to reduce violence Unhappy dinner guests were prone to using their sharp knives for more than just eating and partly to foster more civilized table manners.
This shift to blunt-tipped knives also made forks more popular, since knives could no longer be used to spear food.
The word cutlery goes back to a Latin word culter, which also meant knife, and is a word you'll still find in the name of a farming tool called a culter, the blade that cuts the soil ahead of a plow.
So at your Thanksgiving table, when you pick up that rounded butter knife, you're holding the direct descendant of Cardinal Richelieu's innovation and King Louis XIV's later edict that's meant to keep you from picking your teeth or stabbing someone.
Now, unlike the fork and the knife, the spoon has never caused a moral panic or needed a royal edict to blunt it.
The spoon is the most universally accepted and uncontroversial of all eating utensils and has come in really just a vast array of shapes and sizes over human history.
According to Edamonline, the word spoon comes from Old English spone, meaning chip sliver, shaving or splinter of wood.
And this makes sense because the earliest spoons were carved from chips of wood.
The oldest ornamental and religious spoons date to around 1000 BC.
Ancient Egyptians made spoons from all kinds of material, wood, flint, ivory, and so on.
And the spoons were often super ornate, carved with hieroglyphics and religious symbols.
Later, Greeks and Romans made spoons from bronze and silver.
During the Middle Ages in Britain, hosts typically supplied wooden or horned spoons for their guests, but the elite used metal.
For example, accounts of King Edward I in 1300 show that he had seven gold and eight silver spoons.
And this brings us to silver spoons and babies.
Beginning in Tudor times, wealthy godparents would give silver spoons to their godchildren at christening ceremonies, often apostle spoons, which were silver spoons with the image of one of the twelve apostles on the handle.
Wealthy benefactors would give a baby the entire set of twelve, while the less well-off would give four spoons representing Matthew Mark, Luke and John, or possibly even just one with the saint whose name the child had been given.
The practice was common enough that it became a metaphor for wealth and privilege, first appearing in English in a translation of Don Quixote in 1719 in the line Every man was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
But according to the Word History site, the first appearance originally in English is from the Irish novelist, playwright and poet Oliver Goldsmith in 1762 and reads one man is born with a silver spoon in his mouth and another with a wooden ladle.
And speaking of ladles, what would Thanksgiving be without a ladle to serve the gravy?
The word ladle comes from the Old English hladel, meaning a thing for drawing up or loading.
A ladle is literally a tool for loading liquid from one vessel into another.
The Latin equivalent was trula, meaning a small ladle or scoop, and the Romans used ladles extensively for serving their elaborate sauces and stews.
But the ladle goes back much farther.
Archaeological evidence suggests that people have used ladle-like tools since prehistoric times, when they needed to transfer liquids to bowls.
The Getty Museum website says in ancient Greece a ladle was a standard part of any wine.
Set used to dip out wine from large mixing vessels into cups.
And the Birmingham Museum of Art says the soup ladle was purportedly invented by the French courtier Charles de Saint-Humac, Duke of Montusy, in the mid-1600s.
Before that, people dipped their individual spoons in a tureen or even drank soup from a common bowl.
Thankfully, we don't do that anymore, and ladles can get a lot of action at Thanksgiving.
Ladling gravy over turkey and mashed potatoes, filling hot spiced drinks and serving turkey soup for days after.
And when it's time for desserts and coffee, you might bring out the fancy cups and saucers.
And here's something that you might not have thought of, but that seems obvious once you hear it.
Saucers were originally for sauce, not for supporting cups.
According to Edemon Line, saucer ultimately goes back to the Latin word salus, meaning salted.
Now the connection between sauce and salt makes sense when you understand that sauce itself comes from Latin salsa, meaning things salted, salt food.
The Proto-Indo-European root is sal, S-A-L, meaning salt.
So saucers were quite literally little dishes for salty things, specifically for holding sauce on the table.
It was only around 1700 that the meaning shifted to small round, shallow vessel for supporting a cup or retaining any liquid that might spill.
A pretty dramatic change in function from holding sauce to holding a cup and catching drips.
Finally, we have the charger, another item that goes under another piece of tableware.
Chargers are large decorative plates that sit at each place, setting under the dinner plates, creating an elegant base for your table.
I don't know about you, but holidays are the only time my family uses chargers.
Well, the word charger in this context comes from the Norman French word meaning a place where things are loaded.
The same root gives us words like charge to load up with something like electricity, and cargo something that's loaded.
So a charger plate is something another plate is loaded onto.
The word charger dates back to around 1300, when they were often made of wood, pewter, or for the very wealthy, silver or gold.
Unlike regular dinner plates, chargers were meant to stay on the table throughout the meal, with other plates placed on top of them, though they're always supposed to be removed before dessert is served.
According to the Fine Art Restoration Company, ceramic craftsmen used chargers to show off their skills, and the plates could be quite ornate.
And by the 1700s.
Quote no aristocratic European home was complete without a display of porcelain tableware with grand chargers as one of the central elements unquote.
And they were often made to be displayed or given as gifts rather than used on the table.
By the Victorian era the use of chargers had waned somewhat, but they've made a.
So there you have it.
The fork was once considered so sinful that a princess's death from plague was declared divine punishment for using one.
The knife is one of humanity's oldest tools.
The spoon started as wood chips.
The ladle is literally a loading tool.
The saucer started life holding sauce before it ever supported a cup.
And the charger is a loading plate that adds elegance to your table or that can be hung on a wall.
So if you're gathered around a Thanksgiving feast this week, ponder your butter knife and the 400 years of civilized dining it represents.
And delight your kith and kin with stories of kings and queens, salty sauces and ancient table manners.
And happy Thanksgiving.
Also, I'm completely out of familect stories, and sitting around the Thanksgiving table is a great time to ask your parents or grandparents where your familects came from.
So chat them up and send me your stories.
The number is 83-321-4GIRL.
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Thanks for listening.
