Sugar and spice... : exploring food and drink idioms in English

This work seeks to uncover what food and drink idioms have characterized the history of the English language since the year 1755. This is the year in which the first edition of Samuel Johnson''s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) was published. With the advent of this dictionary, the English people felt that they had finally been graced with a reliable dictionary that could provide their language with a standard. Johnson’s Dictionary is therefore an important landmark, not only in the history of lexicography, but in the history of the English language itself. Having been judged as the first ‘modern’ dictionary, it became the first real authority for the English language. In order to explore the food and drink idioms that have made the history of the English language, Johnson’s Dictionary is the first of a series of monolingual dictionaries to become the object of this investigation. In this research twelve synchronic native-speaker and learner’s monolingual dictionaries become the archives in which to look for and examine the food and drink idioms that have been part of the English language since the year 1755. To fill the 250-year lexicographical gap, one dictionary is chosen to represent the eighteenth century, three to represent the twentieth century, and seven to represent the twenty-first century. As linguistic studies, and in particular lexicographical practice, become more and more empirically and electronically-based from the 1980s onwards, it was deemed important to support this lexicographical analysis with data issued from two linguistic corpora. Two of the most recent and largest general reference corpora – the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Bank of English (BoE) ¬ – were therefore chosen to provide a further testimony of the way in which food and drink idioms have been used in English since the mid 1960s, at least. Through the close examination of the dictionaries and the corpora, this work intends to uncover how many food and drink idioms have existed in the English language in the last 250 years. It will reveal their degree of idiomaticity, their level of intelligibility, and the dates and sources of their very first appearance in the English language. By comparing and contrasting the lexicographical descriptions and the corpus linguistic data, this work will reveal the rate and the manner of usage of each food and drink idiom in the last 250 years. It is an investigation that will offer results of the quantitative and qualitative kind. The elaboration of such data will ultimately disclose the linguistic characteristics of the food and drink idioms in English. It will reveal how these idioms have been treated in 250 years of lexicography. It will unveil what kind of communicative instrument these idioms are. This exploration will be actualized in six chapters.