Blogger’s Note: I have remarked previously on the diversity of my readership. Mine is not one of those blogs by an enthusiast of late 14-Century coastal Chinese ivory carvings for enthusiasts of late 14^th-Century coastal Chinese ivory carvings. I do try to be more than one or two things to more than one or two folks, and that inevitably means that not every post I write will interest everyone who reads it.

If words ain’t your thing, you might want to skip this week’s post. If you get a third of the way through and aren’t enjoying it, there’s not much point in reading on. I plough a narrow furrow this week, and I know it’s not a furrow that everyone finds groovy! As Bernice said when giving it her seal of approval: “OK! It’s not for me, but it’s a nice blog.”

You have been warned. No money back beyond this point.

A pudding, my OED (Oxford English Dictionary) informs me, is a sweet or savoury steamed dish made with flour. What, I ask myself, could be less suitable for Pesach, since steaming flour would inevitably create chametz, the leaven that is the very antithesis of Pesach? However, the reality of life at the moment makes me want to embrace some kind of escapism, and so I offer you, this week, a piece that is full of hot air and, featuring, as it does, a cabbage and a mulberry, promises to be both savoury and sweet.

When I’m looking to escape, I usually bury myself in a puzzle. Any puzzle will do, but, given the choice, it would be a word puzzle; if available, a crossword puzzle; preferably, a Times crossword puzzle; ideally, the Times Cryptic. So, I seek refuge this week in two of the clues from last week’s Times Cryptic puzzle.

Let’s start with the cabbage. In last Thursday’s Cryptic, the following clue appeared:
Steal from Savoy (7)

Most solvers were able, from the ‘lights’, (the letters shared with words that crossed this word on the crossword grid) that the answer was CABBAGE, of which Savoy is a variety that is similar to green cabbage but a bit milder and sweeter, with leaves that are looser and more ruffly. Its name derives from its assumed origin in the Savoy region of France, the Western Alpine area bordering Italy and Switzerland.

So far, so good.

“But what”, you – and many, many Times crossword solvers – ask, “has ‘steal’ to do with cabbage?”

Well, it transpires that ‘cabbage’ is slang for ‘steal’.

“But why?” you continue – and even if you don’t, because you are asleep by this stage, rest assured that I certainly did.

And the answer is…not as straightforward as you might have hoped. All I can offer you, after considerable research, is a couple of tentative suggestions.

There are many cases where a slang word appears to bear no relation, in sound or meaning, to the target word. ‘Cabbage’ seems to have no association with ‘steal’. In such cases, the most common explanation is that it is a term in Cockney rhyming slang, a slang devised deliberately to be incomprehensible to outsiders. Cockney rhyming slang uses the device of finding a common two-word (or sometimes three-word) phrase that happens to rhyme with the target, then removing the second (rhyming) word of the phrase and using only the first word in slang. Common examples are:
butcher’s (hook) = look
apples (and pears) = stairs
daisy (root) = boot

It has been suggested that ‘cabbage’ derives from cockney rhyming ‘cabbage leaf’ to mean ‘thief’. However, this is unlikely, since the standard cockney slang for ‘thief’ is ‘tea leaf’ (and not, confusingly, ‘tea’). In addition, ‘thief’ is not a synonym of ‘steal’.

‘Cabbage’ is used as a slang term for ‘money’ (presumably because a cabbage leaf is green (the traditional and original colour of the ₤1 note) or, when it is stale and worth less, brown (the traditional and original colour of the 10-shilling note). However, the leap from ‘money’ to ‘steal’ seems to me too far.

A second, more promising, suggestion comes from the tailoring trade. When a customer pays a tailor to make a suit, part of the cost is the cost of the length of material cut from a bolt (or roll) of cloth. The cutter unrolls a suitable (pun intended) length of cloth, chalks out the pattern of the suit on the length of cloth and cuts the length from the bolt. He then cuts out the chalked pattern. The art of the cutter lies in laying out the various elements of the pattern (the various pieces of the suit – two sleeves, a jacket back, a jacket front, pocket flaps, etc.) in such a way as to minimise the length of cloth required, thus enabling the tailor either to minimise the cost of the suit, or to maximise his profit margin, as desired.

Nevertheless, however skilled the cutter is, there will inevitably be some scraps left over after the pattern has been cut out. For those of you who have stayed awake to this point, we have reached our destination. Those offcut scraps are referred to as ‘cabbage’. This probably reflects their resemblance to shreds of cabbage, or, possibly, their resemblance to straw wastage (which was called ‘garbage’, a word which then came to acquire its modern meaning). Over the years, the word ‘garbage’ mutated to ‘cabbage’. Some people claim that, because of its resemblance, when shredded, to straw garbage, the brassica was originally named ‘garbage’, which was corrupted, over the years, to ‘cabbage’.

At least since the 20^th Century, the convention in Britain was that any cabbage was the property of the tailor and not the customer who had paid for the cloth. Therefore, when I read suggestions that ‘tailor’s cabbage’ is the origin of the slang term ‘cabbage’ for ‘steal’, I was surprised, and, on Bernice’s behalf, deeply offended. Her late grandfather, at least one great-uncle, and, later, an uncle, were all cutters in London’s East End.

However, further research shows that this convention was not always the case. As far back as the end of the 17^th Century, tailors tried to claim the scraps from cutting out a client’s garment as their perk, but this was by no means the norm.  Some clients felt that the scraps should be theirs, not the tailors, and less scrupulous tailors were even accused of inflating the amount of fabric needed for a garment, or cutting it poorly, in order to maximise the cabbage.

Dyche’s Dictionary of 1748 describes cabbage as: “…a cant word to express anything that is pilfered privately, as pieces of cloth or silk retained by taylors, mantua-makers or others”.

In 1811 A Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue described cabbage as: “clothe, stuff or silk purloined by tailors from their employers”. (The use of ‘employer’ here, rather than ‘customer’, implies that this refers to tailors employed as a permanent part of a great household. In that case, it seems less likely that the cabbage would have been regarded as the tailor’s, rather than his master’s, property.)

It is a short step from ‘the thing stolen’ to ‘to steal’, and this explanation seems to me most likely.

On that inconclusive note, let us move one day back to last Wednesday’s Cryptic, and the following clue:
Lives, I see, in cooler Iranian city (7)

This is what we cruciverbalists (crossword enthusiasts) call an IKEA clue, containing, as it does, cryptic instructions which, if you can follow them, enable you to assemble the answer piece by piece. Let’s first solve it step by step.

Lives = IS; I see = AH!; Cooler = FAN; I see is in cooler, so we need to write IS and then AH inside FAN. This yields IS F-AH-AN; in other words, ISFAHAN, an Iranian city.

I came to the crossword only on Thursday morning, and was therefore very amused to see this clue, since the news that morning was full of reports of the defence system for Iran’s nuclear installation at Isfahan being destroyed by missiles. When I looked at the website that offers analysis, every day, of the Times crossword, explaining the solution of every clue, I saw that many of the commenters, who had, of course, solved on Wednesday, before the news broke, were complaining that they had never heard of this ‘obscure’ Iranian city. In defence of the setter, since the IKEA clue was very fair, it was certainly possible to construct the answer without having heard of the city, which many, many solvers did.

On the Thursday morning, I posted a comment on the site, which read as follows:

I suspect that fewer solvers will not have heard of the Iranian city at 19 Down this morning. Shades of the Telegraph crosswords before D-Day.

That reference to the Daily Telegraph is a story that bears retelling. In the run-up to the D-Day landings in 1944, a Daily Telegraph crossword compiler was arrested and interrogated by British Intelligence after a run of crosswords featuring codewords linked to the landings — UTAH, OMAHA, OVERLORD, MULBERRY and NEPTUNE all appeared. He was a headmaster at a school next to a camp where US and Canadian forces were preparing for the landings. He was eventually released, and the incident was dismissed as a bizarre coincidence, or possibly a sub-conscious selection of words overheard in the pub as a result of careless talk.

This post is due to be published on the morning after chag in Israel, and the last morning of chag outside Israel. I hope you all had a meaningful and restful chag, and feel ready to steel yourselves for what promises to be an even-more-than-usually-charged 9 days embracing Holocaust Day, Remembrance Day and Independence Day in Israel: of which, probably, more next week.