The Cellar - Psalm 61

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- Creative Expression (http://cellar.org/forumdisplay.php?f=35)

- - Psalm 61 (http://cellar.org/showthread.php?t=29469)

Speaking of Madam Antoinette, I just learned an interesting thing about the whole "Let them eat cake" story.

This historian was arguing that "cake" did not mean pastry as we think of it, but what was colloquially referred to as cake back then, which was the clumpy black shit that poor people cleaned out of chimneys. (This is where we get the phase about something being "really caked on" a surface.) So it wasn't in fact a case of a clueless aristocrat who had no idea what it's like to be without money, as people tend to interpret the story today, but rather a cruel and uncaring aristocrat who thought the poor's suffering deserved a good pun.

fobble, I am disappoint.

Quote:

cake (n.) Look up cake at Dictionary.com
early 13c., from Old Norse kaka "cake," from West Germanic *kokon- (cf. Middle Dutch koke, Dutch koek, Old High German huohho, German Kuchen). Not now believed to be related to Latin coquere "to cook," as formerly supposed. Replaced its Old English cognate, coecel.
What man, I trow ye raue, Wolde ye bothe eate your cake and haue your cake? ["The Proverbs & Epigrams of John Heywood," 1562]
Originally (until early 15c.) "a flat, round loaf of bread." Piece of cake "something easy" is from 1936. The let them eat cake story is found in Rousseau's "Confessions," in reference to an incident c.1740, long before Marie Antoinette, though it has been associated with her since c.1870; it apparently was a chestnut in the French royal family that had been told of other princesses and queens before her.
cake (v.) Look up cake at Dictionary.com
c.1600, from cake (n.). Related: Caked; caking.

or this interesting article with footnotes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake
that points to a similar statement made by a 3rd century Chinese emperor.

I'm hungry.

Meh, better than yellowcake. :cool:

And way better than urinal cake.

Nowhere near as nice as Pontefract cake though*

* I like them now. I was dismayed by them as a child.