Answering questions at Boston College O’Neill Library
Food history is a fascinating topic. We have several resources in the TX353 call number range (Floor 3, Shelf 141.) One gets bogged down in the fierce controversies about “what is pie?” The short answer is that some form of pie-like baked good existed in ancient Egyptian and Greek culture – not your typical dessert dish of today, though! Here’s a fun blog post about it from the Library of Congress: bit.ly/PieHistoryLC
I often turn to the OED when I’m curious about the history of a word like “woe” (bit.ly/OED-woe – sign-in required). It’s quite an old word, dating at least back to bronze age proto-Iranian, and appears independently in non-Indo-European languages as well, suggesting its derivation is onomatopoetic, that is, it’s based on the sound of human expressions of sadness & grief. The Yiddish form (“Weh,” as in “Oy Weh!”) probably has more currency now than the English “Woe,” which is a little archaic. In recent history, Jews have good reason to be standouts in acute woe, and yet they’re also standouts in expressions of humor. It’s a mystery. Unfortunately, humankind seems to distribute woe generously, so there is no one group or person who can claim to be the most woeful in all of history.
