Sean Carabini
Pronunciation: lob-skous
Definition: A stew of meat, vegetables and hardtack made by sailors.
Origin
Originally from the English word ‘Loblolly’ – a late 16th century term for a thick gruel. ‘Lob’ is thought to be a word used to replicate the sound of bubbling. ‘Lolly’ is an old English word for ‘soup’.
Why This Word?
I’ve eaten some pretty interesting food in my time. The more obscure, the better. There’s very little that will put me off trying something unless it’s endangered or if it still has a face when it reaches my plate …
But I never, ever want to try lobscouse. It has to be the most appalling name for an item of food I’ve ever heard and indeed sounds like it may be a more appropriate term for some form of unwanted process of emergency egestion rather than something that one would wish to in ‘ingest’ …
How to use the word lobscouse in a sentence?
You will never, ever sit in a restaurant and hear someone say “I’ll have the crab claws to start and the lobscouse for my main course.”
But there is a place where a derivative of this word is still in use. People from Liverpool are sometimes affectionately – and otherwise – known as ‘scousers’. Why, you might ask? Because they ate a lot of lobscouse … True story.
