Judith Tschann, Author Dishing with Stephanie's Dish

Stephanie [00:00:16]:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to Dishing with Stephanie's Dish, the podcast where we talk to people that have written unique, amazing, and in this case, super fun books about food. I'm here with Judith Chishon, and she is a friend of a friend sister, which is fun to talk with her, too. Susie Mindrum is her sister, who's a good friend of our families and has been so kind to me and my stepmom. So it's fun to talk with you, Judith. She reached out and said, Would you ever want to talk to my sister? She has this funny book called “Romaine Wasn't Built in a Day”.
Judith [00:00:53]:
Sister in law.
Stephanie [00:00:54]:
Okay. Sister in law. It's amazing.
Judith [00:00:58]:
Yeah.
Stephanie [00:00:59]:
So do we call you? Is it an entomologist? The person who studies the nature of words?
Judith [00:01:08]:
Yeah. Etymologist no, n otherwise people might think it pertains to bugs.
Stephanie [00:01:16]:
Yes, that's right. So etymology is the derivative of words.
Judith [00:01:22]:
Yeah, right.
Stephanie [00:01:24]:
How did you think of putting this book together? Because why don't you describe it in your own words? Okay.
Judith [00:01:31]:
A somewhat short answer as to how it came about. I specialized in Old English and Middle English in graduate school, and as a professor, I had the great good fortune to teach history of the language, which, of course, included many discussions about the immense vocabulary of English and where all those words came from. And over the course of many, many years, I had amassed a huge pile of notes about interesting word histories. And then when the Pandemic hit, I put them all together into a book.
Stephanie [00:02:17]:
Isn't it amazing how many books were spawned by the pandemic?
Judith [00:02:22]:
Yes, really, it is.
Stephanie [00:02:26]:
And do you have a personal love of food or why this focus specifically on food words?
Judith [00:02:33]:
Yeah. Well, that's a good question. Yes. I love food. I am very interested in the history of food. I taught a course once long ago on food and literature, and often even in other courses, talked about the role that literature, that food played in a book. But the first love, I guess, was words. Even as a kid, I mean, all kids love to play with words, rhyming and punning and doing Dr. Susan kinds of things. And if I can indulge in one anecdote that's popping into my head right now about a love of language, even as a kid, I don't know how old I was maybe seven, eight, something like that. We were sitting around the table at my grandmother and grandfather's house, and he was holding forth with an anecdote, the punchline to, which was in Norwegian. And everybody burst out laughing, probably including me, though I didn't understand what he had said. I had a few words of Norwegian, that was it. But it really stands out in my head that a kind of moment of paying attention to the medium, perhaps, rather than the message that it was funny for everybody, maybe because literally what he said, but also because he said it in another language. We call that code switching now, and I wouldn't have articulated the whole business the way I am now, but it was a fun moment of awareness of I'm going to call it the ludic quality of language meaning the playfulness and all the things that we can do with language. Like tell jokes.
Stephanie [00:04:39]:
Yeah. And the lyricism of it. Right.
Judith [00:04:42]:
Yes. And I was a dictionary reader even at a young age. I don't know why exactly.
Stephanie [00:04:50]:
It makes me laugh that you just said that, like we're all dictionary readers. You read the dictionary as a young kid.
Judith [00:04:58]:
Yeah. I remember looking up words and making marks in the book. And I love the word pugnacious. Who knows why?
Stephanie [00:05:09]:
Right.
Judith [00:05:10]:
And naughty words were sometimes in there. Although I admit I was using a very old punk and wagon's dictionary, which did not have very many naughty words. Yeah. I've j