Undercups

I learn this morning from Maigret of reference 3, that the French talk about undercups rather than saucers. That is to say soucoupes, or less often sous-tasses. The latter being present in Larousse but not Littré. They also talk of flying undercups. I think that the technical term for this sort of thing is a calque, where two languages build the same idiom - in this case for flying saucers - even though the base word differs. Honeymoon is another example of such, appearing, I believe, in a number of languages. A topic last noticed at reference 4.

Checking with OED, I find that the word 'saucer' has a long history in English, with a saucer starting out as a receptacle for sauce, but generalising to all kinds of other related uses, including, for example, the blood from a blood-letting. And from there to all kinds of things vaguely saucer-like in shape. Plus suggestions from 1776 and 1840 that drinking tea from your saucer was something that the vulgar did, perhaps a working man in hurry. But not a real lady or gentleman. Which is not what I had thought at all.

There is a bit more about this at reference 2, where the story is that drinking tea from the saucer is primarily a Scandinavian or Russian thing - while elsewhere it was more of a class marker, if anything. Posh drank from the cup, prole from the saucer. A post which attracted lots of comments. While I thought that Russians drank their tea out of glasses. Perhaps with lemon.

Maybe there is more to be found out here.

References

Reference 1: Tea Drinking - Konstantin Makovsky -  1914. The painting above: perhaps just a touch fanciful.

Reference 2: https://19thcentury.wordpress.com/2014/01/12/drinking-from-saucers/.

Reference 3: Les Scrupules de Maigret - Georges Simenon - 1958. Volume XX of the Rencontre collected works.

Reference 4: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/06/revivals.html.