Fans of The Great British Bake Off (known in the U.S. as The Great British Baking Show because of a trademark issue) know that you don’t want your baked goods to be stodgy or claggy. The verb to stodge, meaning “to stuff,” goes back some 400 years and stodgyeventually came to describe something “heavy” or “bogged down.” Today, stodgy also describes a curmudgeonly person who’s set in their ways. Claggy is likely from Norse, and shows up in Scotland and Northern England to mean things like “messy,” “mucky,” or “clotted,” and is likely a linguistic relative of words involving sticky things, such as clay. This is part of a complete episode.
More from this show
After our conversation about funny street names, listeners chime in with more: In Tallahassee, Florida, there’s a Frankie Lane and a Lois Lane; in Batesville, Arkansas, you can meet up at the intersection of Gwinn and Barrett; Boulder Creek...
Martin, who lives in San Diego, California, shares some of his favorite surfing slang, including A-frame, boosting, and gnar. He’s curious about the use of gangbusters in filmmaker Bruce Brown’s surfing classic The Endless Summer 2 to...
You must log in to post a comment.