Eccles

[An Edwardian mill alongside the Bridgewater Canal in Winton. Built in 1906 by the Eccles Spinning and Manufacturing Company, the mill was demolished in 2010. A satanic mill? A Lowry mill?]

An odd fragment of dream came back to me during the course of yesterday, this coming back of a fragment long after waking being a bit odd in itself. And coming back as it did, it took me a while to sort out that it was a fragment of dream rather than something that had actually happened.

A fragment involving Eccles cakes, which cropped up recently at reference 1. I was in a baker or something like and the shop lady - an attractive older lady - was explaining to another customer about all the things you could do with Eccles cakes. Which included serving them with jam, cream and honey on top or something gooey of that sort. I raise my eyebrows and she said that this was a common treat in Lancashire (where Eccles is indeed to be found, near Salford. I must have known this somehow. See reference 2). I said that they did very good Eccles cakes on the Isle of Wight which the shop lady said was not surprising at all.

I associate this morning to the thesis advanced at reference 3 to the effect that one of the pillars of Britain's industrial revolution was the cheap calories provided by the sugar grown by the slaves of the Caribbean. Another better known pillar was the cotton grown by the slaves of the southern states of the US. States which, as it happened, tended to be named for the monarchs of England, sometimes of France.

While an unconnected and unread story is offered by the often dubious Microsoft News about how some people think that the term 'black market' is racist and should be avoided. A term which I think is used less now that it was, and which I associate with the illegal buying and selling of controlled goods, particularly food and ladies' gear - such as cosmetics and stockings - during the second world war. Cursory search did not come up with a clear answer about origins, but the one I prefer is calque from the German 'Schwarzmarkt' from around the time of the first world war. 

Bard was vague, including no more than a suggestion that black market might have something to do with people of colour, but responding positively to my German suggestion, which it had not, however, come up with of its own accord. It does like to agree with one!

Webster's includes various sort of black market among its three pages of black things, but offers no suggestions about origins. While the 'B' volume of OED, dated 1888, does not have black market at all, the nearest it gets being black mark. But it does point me to some confusion between black and blake, the latter being an obsolete word from up north meaning white, pale or yellow. With white and black sharing an absence of hue or colour. At least old printed books of this sort are not tainted by all the garbage floating around in the world of social media.

Perhaps the same people find the used of 'dark web' offensive. But I think we will be in for trouble if we try to excise all the language which uses the good-bad axis of lightness-darkness, white-black. From where I associate to white being the colour of mourning in some cultures. All very complicated.

For calque see reference 5.

PS: the real source of all this now comes back to me. The lady in question was behind the counter in the cheese shop which I really did visit yesterday morning, and she had been talking to a tourist from the US about how some people put cheese on their Eccles cakes. A bit later on I had a fairly heavy lunch - to be reported on in due course - and I may have dozed off a bit at some point after that. With the dream fragment coming from that doze, not from the sleep of the previous night at all.

References 

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-chine.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eccles,_Greater_Manchester.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/04/out-of-africa.html.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_market.

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/01/undercups.html.