Way back in the 1440s, the word “spud” described a digging instrument used to inter the seedling of a plant that yielded a starchy tuber. By 1845, the word was used to describe the starchy tuber itself. And so began a word’s etymological journey through the mysteries of language, at least until a meddlesome polyglot by the name of Mario Pei came along. Author of The Story of Language (1949), Pei attributed the origin of the word “spud” to the acronym of a league of potato-fearing Englishmen called “The Society for the Prevention of Unwholesome Diet.”
Although linguists sniggered and pointed fingers, Pei’s assertion was founded on a subterranean history of British potato suspicion. It started with the concern among Scottish clerics in the Seventeenth Century that potatoes weren’t mentioned in the Bible. When the first Great Irish Famine (1740-1741) saw infected potato crops decimate the population of Scotland’s neighbour, the Holy Order had a field day. To top things off, the first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (published in Edinburgh in 1768) referred to the potato as a “demoralizing esculent.”
Things settled down and potatoes lay dormant in the Scottish psyche until Spud returned in the form of a bespectacled and emaciated heroine addict slinging brown slime across the breakfast table. It was 1996 and the film was Trainspotting. Democratic South Africa was two. Ten years later a South African would write a novel entitled Spud. The book would tell the story of a boy in a boarding school in South Africa in 1990.
► Spud Part 2 :: Safe House
► Spud Part 2 :: Safe House
