* * * * * _Eating humble-pie._—The phrase “eating humble-pie” is traced to the obsolete French word “_ombles_,” entrails; pies for the household servants being formerly made of the entrails of animals. Hence, to take low or humble ground, to submit one’s self, came familiarly to be called eating “humble” or rather “umble” pie. The word “umbles” came to us from the Norman conquest, and though now obsolete, retains its place in the lexicons of Worcester and Webster, who, however, explain the entrails to be those of the deer only. * * * * * _Fiasco._—A German, one day, seeing a glassblower at his occupation, thought nothing could be easier than glassblowing, and that he could soon learn to blow as well as the workman. He accordingly commenced operations by blowing vigorously, but could only produce a sort of pear-shaped balloon or little flask (fiasco). The second attempt had a similar result, and so on, until _fiasco_ after _fiasco_ had been made. Hence arose the expression which we not infrequently have occasion to use when describing the result of our undertakings. * * * * * _Fudge._—This is a curious word, having a positive personality underlying it. Such at least it is, if Disraeli’s account thereof be authentic. He quotes from a very old pamphlet entitled _Remarks upon the Navy_, wherein the author says, “There was in our time one _Captain Fudge_, commander of a merchantman, who upon his return from a voyage, how ill fraught soever his ship was, always brought home his owners a good crop of lies; so much that now, aboard ship, the sailors when they hear a great lie told, cry out, ‘You fudge it’.” The ship was the Black Eagle, and the time, Charles II.; and thence the monosyllabic name of its untruthful captain comes to us for exclamation when we have reason to believe assertions ill-founded. * * * * * _Gossip._—This is another of that class of words which by the system of moral decadence that Trench has so ably illustrated as influencing human language, has come to be a term of unpleasant reproach. In some parts of the country, by the “gossips” of a child are meant his god-parents, who take vows for him at his baptism. The connection between these two actual uses of the word is not so far to seek as one might suppose. Chaucer shows us that those who stood sponsors for an infant were considered “_sib_,” or kin, to each other in _God_: thus the double syllables were compounded. Verstigan says:— “Our Christian ancestors understanding a spirituall affinitie for to grow between the parents, and such as undertooke for the childe at baptisme, called each other by the name of _God-sib_, which is as much as to say as that they were _sib_ together, i.e. of kin together, through God.”