When I was a kid, the Jell-O company ran ads in which the tagline was “There’s always room for Jell-O.”
(Even if you didn’t know this line from the original Jell-O commercials, you might know it from one of its secondary lives in places like the movie Ghostbusters 2 and in the TV show Friends.)
The premise of the ads was that even if you’d had a heavy meal, you still had room for dessert—as long as it was Jell-O. It turns out that the Jell-O people might have been on to something besides just marketing, as I learned via a new-to-me word this week: dessert stomach. This all revolves around something called sensory-specific satiety.
Let’s say you’re at a holiday feast. When you’re working your way through the main course, you have a helping of this and that, and maybe a second helping, and maybe just a taste of a third helping. By that time, though, whew! You’re stuffed—or sated, to use another word. You can’t possibly eat another bite of … well, of what you’ve been eating. Per the theory of sensory-specific satiety, you’ve lost your appetite for more of the same. But then dessert comes out, your appetite revives, and you find room in your “dessert stomach” for a slice of pie (or dish of Jell-O). The term dessert stomach also goes by the names dessert shelf, dessert compartment, and pudding stomach (British, obviously).
Early work on sensory-specific satiety was done in the 1920s by an experimenter who let babies choose what they wanted to eat. After a while, they’d get tired of something but would happily switch to a different food. A version of the experiment was run recently by the people at the Vox site, where they fed people macaroni and cheese until they were full. If they offered more macaroni and cheese, the eaters would refuse it, but if they offered ice cream, the participants were much more likely to take a helping. (There’s an article with video about this experiment on their site.)
I think that many people know about the dessert stomach, perhaps especially parents whose kids can pivot from “too full” for the main course to eager for dessert. (Urban Dictionary has a fun writeup of this scenario.) While the term dessert stomach hasn’t entered mainstream dictionaries, Merriam-Webster is keeping an eye on the term for possible inclusion someday in their dictionary.
One last origin for the year 2021. Perhaps over the course of the holiday season you imbibed a little hooch. In the broadest sense, this just means liquor. For your sake, I hope you didn’t have any hooch in its narrower sense, meaning liquor that was made cheaply or obtained illicitly.
It’s a pleasing word, hooch. And it has a pleasing and quite surprising etymology: it’s based on the name of a Tlingit-speaking tribe in Alaska. Not what I would have guessed.
The tribe is the Hutsnuwu, which is a Tlingit word that means “grizzly bear fort” (or so says the OED). During the period of Alaska exploration at the end of the 19th century, members of the Hutsnuwu distilled liquor and sold it to the ever-thirsty explorers, soldiers, and miners.
This liquor became known as Hoochinoo, named for the tribe that explorers bought it from. A cite from 1877: “I have frequently seen soldiers go to the Indian ranch for their morning drink of kootznehoo.”
It didn’t take long for the word to be shortened to just hooch. And people were aware early on that the product they were buying was not aged whisky. A food guide from 1898 observed, “Whenever whisky runs short the Yukoner falls back upon a villanous decoction known as ‘hootchinoo’, or ‘hootch’.”
As the word spread out, it no longer specifically referred to the liquor made by members of the tribe; it came to refer to any alcohol-based “villanous decoction.” And it’s since then been bleached to the point where you can use hooch to refer to booze in general. Which is where we started: hooch that you might have enjoyed during the holiday season.
That seems like a fitting close. Happy New Year!
Like this? Read all the Friday words.