Sunday Word: Collywobbles

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

Sunday Word: Collywobbles

collywobbles [kol-ee-wob-uhlz]

noun:
1 (informal, humorous) stomach pain or queasiness, intestinal cramps
2 intense anxiety or nervousness

Examples:

The whole experience was a wonderful pandemic distraction from start to finish. It's only now that it’s about to actually be on the telly that I am getting a fit of the collywobbles. (Róisín Ingle, 'Are you living your dreams through us?' my daughter asked, The Irish Times, June 2021)

Refreshments come from a tearoom that serves milk from the estate's cows, and before the show tonight's MC, a member of the family who lives at the hall, announces: "If anyone has had a large picnic and is feeling the onset of collywobbles, we have the St John Ambulance here." (Jude Rogers, Richard Thompson review - rock'n'rolling back the years, The Sun Nigeria, August 2018)

But really it is the right time, because even now great cohorts of little children are feeling collywobbles about their looming first days of school. (Meghan Cox Gurdon, Back to the Blackboard, The Wall Street Journal, July 2015)

Within five minutes everybody aboard had the galloping collywobbles and the twittering jitters. (Randall Garrett, Unwise Child)

Origin:

'nauseated feeling, disordered indisposition in the bowels,' 1823, probably a fanciful formation from colic and wobble. Perhaps suggested by cholera morbus. (Online Etymology Dictionary)

We don't know who first clutched his or her tummy and called the affliction 'collywobbles,' but we do know the word's earliest print appearance dates from around 1823. We also know that the word probably came about through a process called 'folk etymology.' In that process, unusual words are transformed to make them look or sound like other, more familiar words. Collywobbles is believed to be a friendlier-sounding transformation of cholera morbus (the New Latin term for the disease cholera) that was influenced by the words colic and wobble. (Merriam-Webster)

Comments

[full-metal-ox.livejournal.com]

My first encounter with the word came from an American author (note that “it” used to be considered an appropriate pronoun to apply to very young children of unspecified gender):

When your little child knows it is going to have a birthday party that afternoon, it gets all excited and won't eat its lunch (and neither will its little prospective guests, once they've learned that they're going to a birthday party). Then, if it gets a lot of ice cream and cake in the middle of the afternoon, it certainly won't eat its dinner, and you are apt to be coping with collywobbles that night.

(Peg Bracken, The I Hate to Cook Book, 1960.)

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

Oh, I adore Peg Bracken - I have had the I Hate to Cook book for years, and managed to track down a couple of other books of hers :)

[full-metal-ox.livejournal.com]

What I grew up with was one of its followups; Mom had (and I’ve since inherited) The I Hate to Housekeep Book. This quick-and-dirty pantry-goods recipe entered household rotation:

WIENERINOS*

“You’ll need a slice of French bread or plain bread per customer.
Toast the slices on one side only. On the other side, spread, in this order:

plain yellow hot-dog mustard
chopped green onions
a good big dollop of canned beans
(any kind—tomato sauce-style or New England; they can be hot from the double boiler if you like, but it’s not necessary)
a good chunk of cheese
(Cheddar, Swiss, or what-have-you)
2 or 3 strips of uncooked bacon

Slide them under the broiler, four or five inches in front of the heating element or flame, until the bacon is done.”

*I’ve taken the liberty of changing the original name, “Beanerinos”; first, because a Google search on the word suggests that it’s an anti-Mexican slur, and secondly because my family substituted hot dogs sliced into medallions for the bacon.

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

I think quite a few of the ones that foodies these days would roll eyes over, they probably taste a lot better than expected :) and the humour is timeless.

Okay if I friend? :)

[full-metal-ox.livejournal.com]

You go right ahead, and I’m flattered; just be aware that there’s not a lot to see at my own LJ, which I’ve used chiefly as a springboard into the communities.

A lot of those old recipes of convenience and desperation—mock apple pie; tomato gravy; onionburgers—have been dusted off over quarantine, as people found themselves strapped for cash and provisions; Gastro Obscura (https://www.atlasobscura.com/gastro), the culinary wing of esoteric travel site Atlas Obscura (https://www.atlasobscura.com/), is a motherlode of that sort of thing.

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

Oh, I adore Atlas Obscura and Gastro Obscura (I have them both of feedly, and harvest regularly :) I can't cook to save my soul - I live with my sister, she is a brilliant cook and I appreciate deeply - but have a deep fascination for domestic history of which old crecipes is a part, of course.

[full-metal-ox.livejournal.com]

And I just found the two articles I’d wanted to cite:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/unusual-dishes-to-make-with-pantry-staples

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/easy-historical-recipes-to-make-at-home