This has been bothering me for over a year. I found a reference to this word from this source: http://www.dict.org/bin/Dict. Definition three (listed below) has a supposed quote from Kipling, although I have searched all online references of Kipling's works and cannot find the source. Has anyone ever seen another reference to this word? Does anyone know what it means? I am assuming it is some sort of animal, but searches through biological and mythological dictionaries have come up empty.
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) :
Mill \Mill\, v. i.
1. To undergo hulling, as maize.
2. To move in a circle, as cattle upon a plain.
The deer and the pig and the nilghar were milling round and round in a circle of eight or ten miles radius. --Kipling.
3. To swim suddenly in a new direction; -- said of whales.
4. To take part in a mill; to box. [Cant]
it's a typo; the nilghai is some sort of antelope -- here's the corrected citation, from The Second Jungle Book:
The deer and the pig and the nilghai were milling round and round in a circle of eight or ten miles radius, while the Eaters of Flesh skirmished round its edge.
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tsu
OK I'm impressed - how on earth did you know that (or is just something that everyone knows and I've just never realised).
Depends upon how much of a Kipling fan you are, I suppose. This quote is, if I remember rightly, from 'Letting in the Jungle', where Mowgli sings his Song against Men of how the 'karela, the bitter karela' will cover their homes.
For what it's worth, karela is what we, in the UK at least, call courgettes. I couldn't stand the stuff when I lived in Inida, and I can't stand it here! Along with aubergines (egg-plant, brinjal, or baingan if you're using the Hindi), it is my least favourite vegetable.
cheer
the sunshine warrior
The Shorter Oxford gives it as 'nilgai' [earlier 'nylghau'] from Sanskrit nila (blue) + gavi (cow). A large Indian antelope, the male of which is blue-grey with white markings and short horns, the female tawny and without horns.
Cheers
Paulb
>how on earth did you know that
must have been some sort of genetic memory.... I certainly didn't read *that much Kipling as a lad, but when I saw the citation I thought it didn't look quite right, so I started from a 'nilgh' search -- correct spelling in hand made finding the confirming citation easy. (It turns out that Kipling used the word more than once; maybe that's why it stuck.)
BTW, got any hunches as you approach the century mark?
8-)
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Shanks
The US for courgette is the italian "zuccini"
as you mention, aubergine is "eggplant"
Thanks for that. Will scrupulously avoid zuccini if ever I see it on a menu!
The correct spelling is
zucchine (or, rare, zucchini).
Ciao dalla terra delle zucchine
Emanuela
Ciao Emanuela
Ok I'll correct my posting to:
zucchini - Italian (zucchine or, rare, zucchini)
(very good with goat's cheese!)
Jo :)
Good to see we're getting so international!
I've always seen "zucchini" in the US, except for some Italian restaurants which spell it "zucchine." I haven't ever seen it without an aitch.
I've checked the oracle for current usage - a search on AltaVista - it looks like both Zuccini and Zucchini are used, so I'll correct my posting again.
Perhaps it is more likely to be zuccini in the UK but as the orginal discussion began because we usually say courgette - weird!
Now that you mention it, I just did a search as well, and it did turn up a few US pages which spelled the word without an aitch. Which is a little odd; as Emanuela noted in a message to me earlier, the aitch is needed in Italian to make the cc sound hard. The pronunciations of "gnocchi" and "Gucci" illustrate this phenomenon.
I wonder now, do the people who spell it that way pronounce "zuccini" with the "ch" sound found in "Gucci?" Or with the k sound found in "gnocchi?"
let's look at the derivation:
zuc*chi*ni (noun), plural -ni or -nis
[Italian, plural of zucchino, diminutive of zucca gourd]
(from MWC)
my guess is that all those "zucinni" turned up by a search are misspellings!
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Well, just to be EXTREMELY precise...
zucca is pumpkin;
gourd can be used for several vegetables of the same family:
for example, zucca, cetriolo ( = cucumber), cocomero ( = watermelon).
Ciao from the old stones of an ancient town in Middle Italy
Emanuela
Fascinating!! With one comment (from the sunshine warrior),
this entire thread swung from a to z!
> my guess is that all those "zucinni" turned up by a search are misspellings!
Twenty pages of mis-spellings! In one of the previous sections - how many citations were needed for to enter a new word in a dictionary.
I accept that in the UK it isn't our word to begin with so it could be a misspelling. I've found almost every variation in cookery books, with the more serious Italian writers using "Zucchine" - which Emanuela tells us is the most common usage in Italy.
Looking at the websites, many of them are Germanic or Scandinavian, so I suspect that this is where the Zuccini spelling originates. Italian is spoken in parts of Switzerland, so there is plenty of opportunity for the languages to merge. Again this is strange as I can't think of many languages outside Italy that use two c's in this way. I'm sure someone on this list will know the answer!
>Twenty pages of mis-spellings!
how many of them are US? zuccini isn't even given as a variant spelling in any US dictionary I know of.
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