Bill Bryson, the prolific Anglo-American author
who writes about everything under the sun and sells lots of books doing it, has
a problem with epergne. The word,
which denotes an elaborate, tiered centerpiece typically holding several dishes
or vases, certainly looks French.
But Bryson says the word doesn’t exist in the French language and no one
knows its origin. In At Home: A Short
History of Private Life, he writes, “For a century or so, no table of
discernment was without its epergne, but why it was called an epergne no one
remotely knows. It just seems to have popped into being from nowhere.”
But words don’t pop out of nowhere, do they?
Certainly, it’s not unusual for a word’s origin
to be uncertain. Roughly half the
words I look up in the Oxford English
Dictionary offer only weaselly, wishy-washy, namby-pamby etymologies. In Bryson’s defense of its non-French
origin, epergne does not have an
acute accent on the first e, as you
might expect, as in étagère. And the
pronunciation is invariably given as EE-PURN (or sometimes A-PURN), but never
with the second syllable rendered as anything resembling PAIRN-YA, as a French
word might be pronounced.
On the other hand, a lot of French transplants,
like epaulet, lose their accents
crossing the Channel. And don’t
forget the Brits have always been impatient with foreign pronunciations—some of
them even insisting the Belgian town of Ypres is called “Wipers.”
But where did epergne come from, then?
The O.E.D.
is willing to admit that it is perhaps….just perhaps…a corruption of the French
épargne, which means “saving” or
“economy.” It’s a leap from that
meaning to a table centerpiece, but Wikipedia’s language expert suggests that
diners were able to help themselves to finger foods like fruit, nuts,
sweetmeats, pickles, etc., from the epergne, and were thus “saved” the trouble of passing their
plates. Hmmmm.
If an epergne revolves, it might be called a
“lazy Susan,” an Americanism from 1906, for which none of the discreetly
prudent dictionaries I have seen wishes to venture an etymology.
In French, incidentally, an epergne is known as
a surtout, which also means “above
all” or “especially.”
The Bard of Buffalo Bayou likes to fill his
epergne with gummy bears and jelly babies to provide a wholesome snack as he
puts pen to parchment to regale his dwindling coterie of fans with semi-verses
like this one:
The
hoity-toity epergne,
It
may not surprise you to lergne,
Has
ergned the disdagne
Of
folks who are plagne,
And
really just don’t give a dergne.
Impressed :)
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