Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Wild etymology

I was listening to this morning’s episode of Radio 4’s Book of the Week – The Etymologicon, by Mark Forsyth.

This is wonderfully read by Hugh Dennis & right up my street but, like cassava pone, proves that you can have too much of a good thing.

It was during this morning's excursion into how the guinea pig got its name that I suddenly thought: Crikes! I think I’ve eaten guinea pig.

My brain, like so many others full of a heavy cotton wool cold right now, is unable to cope properly with sifting the information conveyed via Google one screen at a time to sort out whether or not this might be true.

Was it agouti or cavy? Or capybara?

But it makes me quite proud to find that, according to Kitchen Daily, I share my confusion with none other than Charles Darwin.

Charles Darwin and his shipmates, in S. America in the course of their voyage round the world aboard the Beagle, ate agouti, which Darwin described in his journal as ‘the very best meat I ever tasted’. (However, he thought agouti and cavy were interchangeable names, so he may have meant a guinea pig.)