Becoming a Household Name

If you can lay your hands on the 6 January 2007 number of The Spectator (or buy your way into the on-line archive), you'll learn in Dot Wordsworth's excellent column how a great many household names became household names and why their original meanings aren't what you and I thought they were. Why, for instance, aren't there any pans in the pantry? Because pantry is from pan, panis the Latin for bread and the pantry is where you used to keep your bread. And the man who had charge of the bread in your average palatial estate was the pantler or the panter. The larder actually used to be used for lard -- of a sort. "Lard in Old French" says Mrs Wordsworth "meant bacon, hence lardoons".

And butlers were orignally not so much interested in preventing Bertie Wooster from wearing stripes with checks as they were with what he drank. "A butler," we learn, "was in charge of the cellar where the buticula or bottles are kept." "Butler" and "bottle" appear to be first cousins. And there was once such a thing as a "butleress" before she became a "housekeeper".

You really ought to reconnoitre a copy. Learn why there is no butter in a buttery.