Arnold Zwicky's Blog

My morning name from Thursday, 10/3: MARENGO. Which is:

1 an Italian place name
2 the name of a Napoleonic battle fought (near) there

And then from that:

3 the name of Napoleon’s horse
4 any one of various place names in Canada and the US
5 the French dish chicken Marengo
6 any of various colors in the black, dark blue, dark brown, and gray or blue-gray spectrum

As if that weren’t complex enough already, the name MARENGO brought with it a torrent of name associations, from MANDINGO to NINTENDO, which I’ll sample below.

With Napoleon in Italy. From Wikipedia:

The Battle of Marengo was fought on 14 June 1800 between French forces under the First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte and Austrian forces near the city of Alessandria, in Piedmont, Italy [a region at the foot of the Alps in northwest Italy, bordering Switzerland, France, and the Italian Riviera]. Near the end of the day, the French overcame General Michael von Melas’ surprise attack, drove the Austrians out of Italy and consolidated Bonaparte’s political position in Paris as First Consul of France in the wake of his coup d’état the previous November.

… Napoleon’s mount throughout the battle was [then] named Marengo and further carried the Emperor in the Battle of Austerlitz, Battle of Jena-Auerstedt, Battle of Wagram, and Battle of Waterloo.

After Napoleon’s fall, Marengo County, Alabama, first settled by Napoleonic refugees with their Vine and Olive Colony, was named in honour of this battle. Since then, numerous settlements were named Marengo in Canada and the United States

… The French dish chicken Marengo was named in honour of Napoleon’s victory.

On chicken Marengo, from Wikipedia:

Chicken Marengo is a French dish consisting of a chicken sautéed in oil with garlic and tomato, garnished with fried eggs and crayfish. The dish is similar to chicken à la Provençale, but with the addition of egg and crayfish, which are traditional to chicken Marengo but are now often omitted. [The tomatoes are somrtimes omitted as well.] The original dish was named to celebrate the Battle of Marengo, a Napoleonic victory of June 1800.

The tale that the dish was invented on the spot by Napoleon’s chef is a myth; it was certainly created later, in honor of Napoleon, though the details seem to be murky. As you can see above, it’s been varied a lot over the years. From the New York Times Cooking site, Pierre Franey about his “Chicken Marengo” recipe:

In my version, the chicken [the dish can also be made with veal], cut into serving pieces, is simply browned in a little olive oil (I add a touch of butter to give it flavor) on both sides. I then prefer to add sliced mushrooms (there are those who declare that truffles were among the original ingredients), seasonings [bay leaf, thyme, garlic], [dry white] wine, [chicken broth,] tomatoes and parsley and cook covered until done, about 10 minutes longer.

It appears that something like Franey’s recipe — with a sauce of tomatoes, mushrooms, herbs, garlic, and white wine — is now a widespread understanding of culinary marengo.

This takes us through MARENGO items 1 through 5. Bringing us to item 6, the many hues and fabrics with the name marengo. From the Wikipedia page:

Marengo is a shade of gray (black with gray tinge) or blue colors. Sometimes the color is described as a color of a wet asphalt. In the cloth manufacturing industry, marengo usually refers to the color of the fabric and means black or dark brown with small inclusions of white. Sometimes the word refers to black fabric with white threads.

The name marengo appeared in Europe in the 18th century and meant a dark brown fabric with white speckles. The fabric was initially produced in the village of Spinetta Marengo in northern Italy. … After the Battle of Marengo of 14 June 1800, in which Napoleon Bonaparte’s troops defeated the Austrian army, marengo became known as gray or black fabric with splashes of white or gray thread. This color became associated with a gray overcoat that Bonaparte briefly brought into vogue.

… The marengo color was used in the Soviet Union for various uniforms

Apparently, the name marengo hasn’t been applied to any hue or fabric in the clearly red, orange, yellow, green, purple, or white regions of color space, just to the blue, brown, black, and gray regions, but within that domain (of “neutral” colors) it seems to have varied considerably in its reference since the 18th century; US paint companies offering a paint under that name, however, seem to have settled on a dark or charcoal gray as the color marengo.

Associations. When MARENGO popped into my head on awakening a couple days ago, it immediately called up the Napoleonic battle (though I wasn’t too clear about where exactly Marengo was, beyond being somewhere in Europe south of Scandinavia); a color (though I had no clue about what color, and I see now that Marengo was never a Crayola crayon color, so I wasn’t exposed to the color name in my early education in such things); and a chicken dish Ann Daingerfield Zwicky and I sometimes cooked from the Franey recipe.

But before I could rise from my bed and look up all the actual information, my mind was crowded with a noisy jumble of associations, which I couldn’t turn off as I went through the morning rituals of washing up, taking my morning meds, getting into fresh clothing for the day (well, at least briefs and a t-shirt), and so on. I then jotted down all the words clanging in my head and diverted the crowd of new words by starting to look up the old ones, so that I could add informative notes in this posting. That list, with some of those notes:

flamingo the bird, flamenco the dance, Mandingo the African people and the fictional African American stud, mango the fruit, Durango the city in Colorado and the city and state in Mexico, Macondo the fictional town in One Hundred Years of Solitude, meringue /mǝræŋ/ the sweet, merenge / meringue /mǝrɛŋge/ the dance, Melinda the personal name (as in Melinda Gates), impetigo the bacterial skin infection, mahonia the shrub (common name Oregon grape holly), commando a type of soldier, Nintendo the video game console, the creature the Komodo dragon, melisma in singing (matching a group of notes to a single syllable in the text)

These are phonological associations to MARENGO; but you will probably have noticed that some of the same semantic domains show up here as in the list of six Marengo / marengo items. It then turns out that if you pick a phonologically complex nonsense word — BADOMBO, say — and imagine things it might mean, you’ll mostly come up with items in a small set of semantic domains (which will look familiar to you from the two lists you’ve just seen). Even more delightfully, if you treat MORENGO itself as an unfamiliar nonsense word and imagine things it might mean, you’ll get items in these semantic domains, as here:

a dance (let’s all dance the marengo), a game (it’s time to play marengo), a food or drink item (a crop of juicy marengos, a serving of spicy marengo, a box of delicious marengos, an icy marengo in a martini glass), a plant, especially a flowering one (the marengos are in bloom), a color (the bright marengo hue of a marengo fresh from the tree), a disease (in bed with a bad case of marengo), a creature (vicious marengos hulked just outside my window), a body part (I have a sharp pain in my left marengo), a personal name (Marengo has always been my best buddy), a place name (Marengo is the capital of Marengaria)

Let’s all go to Marengaria, down some frosty morengos, and marengo the night away!

 

This entry was posted on October 5, 2024 at 5:55 pm and is filed under Color, History, Language and food, Morning names, Names, Semantics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.