I remember (early in my time in England) asking an English friend what she meant when she said she looked forward to a bit of stodge. She meant 'a carbohydrate-heavy meal'. It was new to me, and this chart from the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE) lets you know why: most Americans don't talk about stodge:
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| stodge in the GloWbE corpus |
But stodgy is a different matter:
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| stodgy in the GloWbE corpus |
So how could I not figure out from context what stodge meant, if stodgy be a relatively common word in AmE?
Because Americans typically don't use stodgy to mean 'carb-heavy'. We mostly use it to refer to someone or something that is so conventional or inactive as to be dull. You can see this in the typical nouns following stodgy in the News on the Web corpus. Here are the top 3:
| BrE | AmE | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | stodgy food | stodgy industry |
| 2 | stodgy performance | stodgy incumbents |
| 3 | stodgy comfort food | stodgy reputation |
Stodgy performance (in sport[s]) in the BrE column shows that it can also mean 'dull' in the UK. It's a negative thing when it comes to things other than food, and it can be negative regarding food too. You might feel unpleasantly heavy after eating stodgy food. But stodgy food can also be nice, as I know all too well.
I reali{s/z}e I haven't given any AmE equivalents. That's because I felt like these words filled a gap in my vocabulary when I learned them. But if any Americans out there have some good words for these things, do let us know in the comments!
P.S. See the comments re the original 'muddy' sense of claggy. It's also made an appearance in the NYT Spelling Bee: an archive of disallowed BrE words post.
P.P.S. I dealt with this a bit more in my newsletter, including a less-used synonym of claggy, clatty. Related, there is also clarty ('smeared/covered with sticky mud'), which didn't make it into the newsletter, but is discussed in the comments below.
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ReplyDeleteI didn't know "claggy". Can it have been popularized in the UK too by "Bake Off" (a show I don't follow)?
ReplyDeleteHi Max, I'm sure all these words have been made more common by Bake Off, but I *think* I'd come across it before hearing it there. It may depend on how much cake one eats and how picky one is about it!
DeletePrevious comment not meant to be Anonymous.
ReplyDeleteI'm familiar with "claggy" as a word descriptive of the sort of clay-ey mud that sticks to your boots, which may be called "clag". I associate the words mostly from my time living in Yorkshire, but I have an old Ordnance Survey one-inch map of Hertfordshire which has a farm called "Claggy Bottom" marked near the village of Kimpton, between St Albans and Hitchin. Looking at the up-to-date OS 1:25 000 map, which I have as a phone app, I see that Claggy Bottom is still there, alongside Claggy Cottage, and the lane that runs along the bottom of the dry (in the sense of not having a river or stream) valley they are in is called Claggy Road. The soil thereabouts is heavy chalk-and-clay and very sticky so it's not hard to imagine travellers on that road in the 19th century finding it very hard going with clag accumulating on their boots. "Claggy" in this case is very descriptive, and it's very easy to extend it to a heavy, sunken, cake.
ReplyDeleteI, too, am familiar with 'claggy' as a (?Lancashire, UK) dialect word referring to the stickiness of mud or soil, and, by extension, to the feel of thick, sticky food in the mouth.
DeleteI'd certainly used claggy for food before Bake-Off, but if you get into clingy mud, the one I picked up in East Yorkshire was clarty. I think I used claggy before that but it's been 20 years now and I'm not sure.
ReplyDeleteHow well known is the north of England/Scottish word "clarty" meaning muddy or dirty? It was common when I was growing up in south Durham, but as I had London accent, I pronounced it with a long 'a' sound, which caused hilarity to my classmates at primary school.
ReplyDeleteIn Arkansas and Missouri, USA, thick clingy mud is called "gumbo" after the thickened fish-and-sausage soup of the area and is often based on red clay (the mud, not the soup). In southeastern California, and perhaps other parts, a black clinging sort of mud is called "caliche" (kah-LEE-chay) after the Spanish word for the calcium mineral that forms on the top of such deposits.
ReplyDeleteI would also use claggy to describe that sort of mud - I'm from Yorkshire too. But also, when a chemistry student, we'd use "clagged out" colloquially for a compound that precipitated from solution in, well, a claggy mess rather than nice clean crystals. The other students were from across the UK, not just Yorkshire.
ReplyDeleteClart - definitely Yorkshire! I think I'd use that for all sorts of unspecified dirt, not just claggy mud. If anything, I'd say clarty was less clingy and more... just dirty
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DeleteChambers just gives clart as Scottish/north of England. It was certainly used in the Geordie dialect. A number of spoof language guides appeared when I was at school, starting with Larn Yorsel Geordie, and clart definitely appeared in those.
DeleteI'm Canadian and I use "stodgy" only in what you call the BrE usage. However I was born in Britain and so I could have learned it from my parents. So I asked my Canadian-born and -raised wife and she also uses it only in the context of food.
ReplyDeleteNot at all. It's also common parlance in England; or at least it used to be amongst pilots at the gliding clubs I frequented back in the 1990s. 'Clag' was shorthand for any type of messy, encroaching cloud-cover that unhelpfully killed off the thermals we needed to stay aloft.
ReplyDeleteAnd I can provide another datapoint for 'clarty'. It's a word which my mother, who hailed from Warwickshire, used to describe that specific type of very sticky mud that adheres to the soles of your boots in huge, heavy clods, making walking difficult or impossible. It's possible that Warwickshire people have as many words for mud as the Inuit people have for snow!
I’m in the North East of England and very familiar with the words “clarts” and “clarty” in the context of mud and muddy. You can also accuse someone of “clarting on” when they are dithering about or messing on with something when they shouldn’t be. There’s also the impression “full of clarts” which is similar to “full of s—t”.
ReplyDeleteAs for claggy, I’ve only really heard it used to describe hot, sticky, humid weather. “It’s a bit claggy out there!”
Oops: “expression” not “impression” as I hope you gathered!
ReplyDeleteI have heard, and used, claggy as the feeling of sweaty armpits (and leg-pits!), necessitating a shower. "I'm jumping in the shower, I've got claggy pits!"
ReplyDeleteStodge/stodgy I've only used for carb-heavy food, like steamed pudding, or the Bolton & Wigan delicacy of a pasty-barm (a potato filled hand-pie inside a soft bread roll)
I think that, in your July newsletter, you meant to write "clart" and "clarty" rather than "clat" and "clatty".
ReplyDeleteI did actually mean 'clat'/'clatty', as those are words too, which mean the same as 'clag'/'claggy'. I should have covered 'clarty' too--though dictionaries have that as meaning 'covered in sticky mud' rather than 'sticky like mud'.
DeleteI don't think I've ever heard "Clatty", only "clarty".
DeleteMe neither. It's not in the latest Chambers, but Google tells me it's Scottish. Which is interesting as Chambers seems to be very good on Scottish dialect.
DeleteI'm not sure who Grhm is replying to, but I (BrE) am with him on clag = cloud. In my case this is in the context of hillwalking, where one often walks up into the cloud that has settled on the summits, and in Scotland, so I wonder if it is regional. I'd also understand clag = mud in context. I'm not sure I would use claggy to describe food.
ReplyDeleteI was replying to a Kiwi who provided a link to "claggy" meaning cloudy and suggested the meteorological usage might be particular to New Zealand. His comment has now vanished. Goodness knows why.
ReplyDeleteI've (UK, Brenglish speaker) long heard and used 'stodgy' to describe people, but definitely people who are stodgy like a stodgy pudding or a meal that fills you, sits in the stomach, slows you down and makes you want to have a snooze. I.e. it's not a dead metaphor and retains its link to its source.
ReplyDeleteIn Australia we have Clag brand glue, a starchy paste used by young kids at school. Apparently trademarked in 1898 in Melbourne! It's always fit very neatly with claggy food, claggy mud, etc to me.
ReplyDelete