kickshaw
noun


- a fancy dish or delicacy; alternatively, a trinket or gewgaw

- a valueless trinket; a small elaborate or exotic delicacy

- a tidbit or delicacy, particularly an appetiser or hors d'oeuvre; alternatively, something showy but without value

- something dainty or elegant, but insubstantial or comparatively valueless; also, a fancy dish in cookery served as an appetizer or hors d'oeuvre

Merriam-Webster, Collins English Dictionary, Oxford English Dictionary, Random House Unabridged 


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WORD ORIGIN


“kickshaw” starts with French "quelque chose" — literally “something”, “a little something”. In late 16th-century English pronunciation the l was dropped, the phrase was anglicised as "quelk-chose", "kickshoes", "kickshaws". English speakers heard it as a plural.

Then they did what English always does: they made a singular from it. If there are kickshaws, there must be one kickshaw. A back-formation.

First known use: 1597, in the meaning of a fancy dish. Shakespeare loved it. He also gives us "kicksy-wicksy" in 'All's Well That Ends Well' (1601) as a ludicrous pet name for “wife” — probably a perversion of kickshaw, a fancy dish.

The Folger Shakespeare Library notes: “ 'Kickshaw' and 'hash' are anglicized words adopted from French cooking in the mid-seventeenth century. From quelquechose (something), kickshaw refers to a puff paste dough filled with berries, marrow, kidney, 'or any other thing what you like best'. ”

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COW IN THE FIELD, BEEF ON THE PLATE

Some words carry a grudge. "Kickshaw" is one, and the grudge is against France.

The English took a plain French phrase, "quelque chose" — "something" — and slowly turned it into an insult. By the 1600s a kickshaw wasn't just a something. It was a suspiciously French something: too fiddly, too rich, too clever. A proper Englishman wanted a joint of mutton. A kickshaw was what foreigners served to hide cheap ingredients under fancy sauce.

That tells us something about language. When one country is uneasy about another, the words it borrows often turn sour. English took a huge amount from French after 1066 — maybe a third of our vocabulary. But the borrowings split by class. The animal in the field kept its plain English name — cow, pig, sheep — while the meat on the rich man's plate went French: beef, pork, mutton. The worker raised it; the Norman lord ate it. You can still read that old resentment on a menu.

Kickshaw sits at the sour end of it, roughly meaning "the silly stuff they go in for."

English is full of these little digs across the Channel. "French leave" means slipping off without saying goodbye — and the French fire back with "filer à l'anglaise", "to leave English-style." Each side accuses the other of the exact same rudeness, in its own language.

The odd part is that insulting the French actually made English richer. Every sour little borrowing added a new shade of meaning we didn't have before. Contempt, it turns out, builds vocabulary,… and the words outlast the quarrel. Nobody today says "kickshaw" to mock France. The sneer is gone; only the handy little word is left, meaning a lovely, pointless trifle — and no politics attached.


Helga & Paul Smith

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SYNONYMS

bagatelle, bauble, bibelot, bric-a-brac, curio, dainty, delicacy, doodad, frippery, gewgaw, gimcrack, KICKSHAWS, knick-knack, novelty, objet, ornamental, trifle, tidbit (US), titbit (UK), trinket, whatnot

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SMUGGLE OWAD into a conversation today, say something like:

“If a dish requires tweezers to assemble,... you are eating a KICKSHAW.”

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