Word To Use Today: sauce.

Here's a jaunty word to spice up a dull November day.

Traditionally in England we have only two sauces. Both of them came in bottles, and one is red (tomato ketchup) and the other brown (and, like its ingredients, nameless).

I'm delighted to report that now as a nation we've moved onwards and upwards, largely because the English are compulsive borrowers.

Yes, we've stolen recipes for sauces from all over the world, made them slightly less tasty, and claimed them for our own.

In some parts of the USA and Canada sauce can, oddly, mean stewed fruit - unless you're in the even odder parts of the USA, where it means vegetables eaten with meat.

In England we just call that a meal.

A few warnings:

You can't sail anywhere in a sauceboat.

Most saucepans aren't designed for making sauces (ALWAYS ask the cook first).

The function of a saucer is now completely different.

And a saucebox always was something completely different. (It's an out-of-date word for someone who's cheerfully rude, or saucy.)

Word To Use Today: sauce.  This word comes from the Latin word salsus, which means salted. Saucer comes from the French saussier, a container for sauce.