And another thing | 19 January 2008

Charles Lamb, writing to Joseph Hume at Christmas 1807 on the subject of ‘a certain turkey and a contingent plumb-pudding’, added, ‘I always spell plumb-pudding with a b, I think it reads fatter and more suetty’. As it happens, the big OED has found the same suetty spelling in a cookery book published in 1726. As Lamb says, one of the delights of the English language is the existence of words which have almost physical properties, a propensity to conjure up succulence or flavour, warmth or cosiness, sounds and magic, powerful images and sheer solid matter. The word spelt with a ‘b’ has nothing to do with ‘plum’, which is correctly defined as ‘The fruit of the tree Prunus domestica, a roundish fleshy drupe of varying size and colour, covered with a glaucous mealy bloom, and having a somewhat flat pointed stone and sweet pulp.’ Useful word that ‘drupe’, isn’t it? By contrast, plumb means ‘to sink or fall like a plummet, to fall straight down’.