Monday, July 19, 2010

Ad"DRESS"ing a Question

I've been trying to come up with an idea for this blog, and Donna at JUST ME gave me one. She was writing of memories of watching her mother "dress" a chicken and, as a passing thought, wondered why taking the guts out of a chicken was known as "dressing". Well, let's just see, shall we?

First of all, I was rather surprised to see how many definitions there are for the word "dress." As a verb, there are around fifteen, as a noun there are four, and as an adjective there are two. There are also at least three ways to use the word as a phrasal verb, and one use of it as an idiom, according to one dictionary.

In our query here, we are dealing with the word "dress" as a verb, meaning "to clean for cooking or sale", as one would do a chicken, a deer, a turkey. (A closely related usage would be the verb definition meaning "to garnish".)

The word "dress" is so common to our everyday language that it is interesting to realize that it hasn't always referred to an article of attire. My OED gives the earliest recorded use of the word "dress" as 14th century. There are three definitions from that century. One, the obsolete one, is "make or put straight or right". The second -- now get this -- is "prepare, treat (later, in a specific way)". So when we say we are dressing a joint of beef, or field dressing a deer, or dressing a chicken, we are using the oldest recorded definition of the word "dress".

Interesting, eh?

And in case you're wondering, the third meaning from the 14th century is "array, equip, attire". From the 18th century we have "line up (troops)", and from the 17th century we get the meaning "personal attire" from William Shakespeare.

The earliest noun sense of the word was "speech, talk", and comes from the 15th century. That sense comes from a verb sense (Latin dirigere), meaning "to direct" (addressing or directing words to other people).

8 comments:

Joann said...

Interesting.... I always thought the 'dressing' part was AFTER the cleaning of the chicken... when you were actually making it tasty with all the seasonings, etc. LOL!!

Donna. W said...

Well now, that was interesting!

Valerie said...

No wonder our language is so hard to learn. So many meanings for one word. LOL Very interesting! Thanks. Val =)

Jenny said...

That was interesting.

Jenny <><

Anonymous said...

Me the noncooker... always thinks of it as cross-dressing. ~Mary

Liz said...

I find myself naked among such wise words.
But I have not lost any borrowed feathers nor any ten pointed crown.
I am as I was when I came into this world.

Ben Karlin said...

I suspect those 14th century words have now become redress, dress, and isn't the French dressage related to the third? I've seen it borrowed into English to refer to riding clothes, haven't I?

My favorite French borrowing related to clothing is a lady's toilet and toilet water. My older sister had a small flask of toilet water she had received as a gift. My younger sister and I used it copiously because it was so easy to refill it. There were three bathrooms in the house and each had a toilet.

oakleighjaddah said...
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