Just deserts. March 13, 2010
Posted by ourfriendben in wit and wisdom.Tags: desert/dessert, English idion, English language, just deserts
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Our friend Ben is a lifelong student of language, and I’m always interested by expressions that don’t mean what they appear to say. “Just deserts” is one of them.
Almost every English speaker is familiar with this expression, as in, “He got his just deserts.” But the word “deserts” in English means arid, sandy pieces of land characterized by cacti, lizards, and the occasional cow skull. How does this relate to the literal meaning of the phrase, i.e., “He got what he deserved?” Not only that, but “just deserts” is pronounced as in “desserts,” the sweet course that ends a typical American meal. No wonder the phrase is so often misspelled! It even seems to make sense: “He got the dessert that was coming to him,” be it a luscious piece of cheesecake or a burnt, stale cookie.
Such, however, is not the case, as our friend Ben was reminded this afternoon when our friend Rob, a journalism professor, showed me a quiz from his copyediting class in which one enterprising student had changed “just deserts” to “gelatin dessert.” After I stopped laughing, I looked up “just deserts” and saw that it originated in the 1500s and derived from “deserving.”
So, for whatever reason, somebody changed “just deserving” into “just deserts.” No exile to a deserted (note, not “desert”) island. No being stuck with a really disgusting dessert because you didn’t qualify for a good one. We’re talking about karma here, getting yours. Our friend Ben can only hope that whoever invented this counterintuitive phrase has been getting his ever since.
Dear Silence or Whoever, Now I feel, in the nicest possible way, we are getting into a trans Atlantic debate here. A dessert [not to be confused with a desert, as in Arizona] is NOT a pudding. A pudding was, is, and I trust will remain, a sweet course of food following a fish and/or meat dish. It, the pudding, may indeed be followed with dessert when, if this were the case, one would expect fruit, as in apples, bananas, oranges, etc.
However, it is the case that in some inferior restaurants in Britain one is offered a dessert menu or, even worse, ‘sweets from the trolley’. All is very well and clearly explained in John Betjeman’s poem ‘How to get on in Society’ or by Nancy Mitford in her book ‘Noblesse Oblige’!!
Whatever, a pudding of cheesecake is, in my view, to be avoided at all costs and a cookie, stale or otherwise, is a biscuit to be taken with afternoon tea. Enjoy!!
Oh, dear, reduced to a “Whoever”! Silence is never going to let me live this down. In fact, I think I hear her gloating now… (Actually, there are three bloggers here at Poor Richard’s Almanac, Edith: our friend Ben, Silence Dogood, and Richard Saunders. One never knows who’ll be posting on any given day!) Most interesting observations, btw. I think pudding followed by fruit sounds rather civilized. (And here I’d always thought the Brits considered puddings to be dense affairs as in black pudding and plum pudding.) Not that we Americans would think of cheesecake as pudding, mind! But it certainly belies its name as “cake”…