The Trusted Contacts networking group meets for breakfast every fortnight to share knowledge and experience and discuss the hot topics of the day. For the last couple of months the hot topic on everyone’s lips (or not, in fact) has been sausages. There have been irregularities. As the Germans might say, things have taken a turn for the würst.
A Full English, as everybody knows, is not a Full English unless it includes at least a modicum of sausagery, ideally concurrent with the other items on the plate. Today the sausages arrived 10 minutes after the rest of the breakfast, which was a bit like a bride arriving late for her own wedding. The tomatoes, bacon, egg, beans etc were kept waiting nervously, throwing the occasional glance in the direction of the door for any sign that the star of the show might be about to arrive. By the time it did, the rest of the ingredients had cooled like a groom having second thoughts and the whole thing passed off in a rather sombre mood.
This in itself may not be the most riveting anecdote you’ve heard this week but try saying ‘sausage’ over and over again without becoming fixated on what a strange and fascinating word it is. Notwithstanding the construction of the word, which we can look at later, the construction of the sausage itself is intriguing.
They say necessity is the mother of invention but I find that hard to believe of the sausage. It must surely have been a happy accident. It’s hard to imagine Thomas Edison, for example, sitting down at his drawing board and saying, “These simple cuts of pork are all very well but what the world really needs is for me to grind the animal down, make a long, delicate sock from the intestinal tract, then carefully stuff the ground meat into the sock, taking care not to split it, segment it into regular lengths, form them into a delicate platt using a baffling folding arrangement and flog them as a staple for barbecues.”
About a year ago, courtesy of my friend Darren, I had the pleasure of spending an evening making sausages at the local butcher’s. I know what you’re thinking: sounds like a Tom Sawyeresque ruse by the butcher to get us to do his job for him. To be honest, if the butcher had tried to sell our efforts the next morning he’d have had the Weights and Measures Commission come down on him like a ton of… like a ton of weights and measures. We were eating funny-shaped sausages for months. Suffice it to say it’s a difficult process. Rather than have me describe it to you, find a video of a snake shedding its skin and play it backwards at 4x speed. You’ll get the idea.
Edison was all for making life (and death) easier, which is probably why he invented the lightbulb and the electric chair instead of the sausage. The fact that the sausage had already been invented may have been a factor too, though that wouldn’t necessarily have deterred Edison if he’d seen commercial potential it. The point is that any inventor intent on changing the world would have overlooked the sausage.
I knew someone who applied to be an inventor. The interviewer said, “Great, what have you invented?” He said, “Nothing yet.” They said, “We’re really looking for someone with a bit more experience.” Tricky business. It’s so hard to get your foot in the door.
So what about the word ‘sausage’ itself? What’s odd about it is that it sounds like it must have evolved in the same way as abstract nouns like damage, pillage, carnage, bondage and all those other French pastimes. But have you ever heard of anyone being accused of causing sausage? Even non-abstract nouns like cottage and foliage were formed by the combination of a French word (cote and feuille in this case) with the French ‘age’ suffix added.
With sausage it’s different. The ‘age’ is not, as you might assume, a French suffix attached to an old French noun meaning something rude. With sausage the whole word arrived as one (probably 10 minutes after the beans), initially spelt sawsyge, as a ham-fisted English derivation of the old French ‘saussiche’, from the Latin ‘salsicus’, meaning ‘seasoned with salt’.
Isn’t that great! Next time you’re waiting for your sausage to arrive you can ponder all that and revel in the glory of this unique marvel of the English language. As words go, it’s a banger.
