Joel Achenbach's post-Christmas post has a word I don't remember ever hearing before. Here's the context:
Food report: I spatchcocked the turkey to within an inch of its life.
Following a link from Wikipedia to the food section of the San Francisco Chronicle's web site, I discovered that this means removing the spine of the bird (in order to cook it flat on a grill, usually).
I guess spatchcocked is more euphonious than saying "I DemocraticCongressed the bird."
On an unrelated note, Princeton's online dictionary offers another definition:
(v) spatchcock (interpolate or insert (words) into a sentence or story)
I don't even have a bluff answer for why these two meanings should be associated with such an unusual-sounding word.
4 comments:
Don't mid me but I assumed that Spatchcocked had an entirely different meaning.
Sornie:
Knowing what I know of your mind, I'm shocked, shocked to hear this.
How is "interpolating" words into a sentence different from (or is it different than) "inserting" them into a sentence? The OED says interpolating is to insert misleadingly new material into a book. It sounds like a pretty fine distinction. If you insert new material into a book that doesn't mislead it is, apparently, still spatchcocking.
TC:
That's an interesting thought. One might, metaphorically, break the spine of a book by inserting too much bogus material.
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