Wednesday 10 May 2023

Word of the Week


Pilgarlic - defined by the OED as (arch) bald head; bald-headed man; poor creature; a man looked upon with humorous contempt or mock pity.

Often preceded by the epithet 'poor', the pil is (or was in the seventeenth century when the word was most common) pronounced the same way as peel, and so the image is clearly of a peeled garlic clove. Possibly this is due to the fact that a person who peels garlic would have hands that smell of it and so might be shunned or abandoned by others.

Another suggestion comes from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. When the pilgrims arrived in Canterbury, the Pardoner gave a barmaid money to buy a good supper, but when he returned, he found another man enjoying her company and eating his food, making him sleep under the stairs. “And ye shall hear the tapster made the Pardoner pull/ Garlick all the long night till it was near end day.” In this context, it sounds somewhat obscene, if we imagine what part of the man's anatomy looked like peeled garlic.

Either way, it is a pretty solid insult and one it might be fun to slip into conversation and see whether you can get away with it.

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