"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 16/01/18 (to take the gilt off the gingerbread, gingerbread, to be a knight of gingerbread, tawdry)

I was asked by one of our audience members, Eamonn Kelly, where the expression "to take the gilt off the gingerbread" comes from.  It's a slightly dated expression now. It means simply to strip something of its appeal. A modern version, I'm told, is, "Who took the jam out of your doughnuts?" It's a similar sort of things. As I say, on the face of it, it's a pretty curious one. But ehen you realise just how elaborate old cakes used to be, it begins to make sense. Five centuries or so ago, treacle and ginger and other spicies were incredibly exotic, brought over from afar. And so they were treated with some reverence and cakes flavoured with them were equally prized. Many of them would be marked with the shape os a saint, or another sacred image and then coloured over, or even covered with gold leaf - so gilded in very literal sense. So the cost, as you can imagine with such exotic ingredients, meant that originally these confections were originally enjoyed only by the rich. But as they became more affordable, gaudy versions used to appear and they became a staple at fairgrounds up and down the land, all of which explains why "taking the gilt off the gingerbread" made absolute sense to people in the 18th and 19th century. Meanwhile gingerbread itself became a byword, if you like, for something that was showy but rather worthless. To be a knight of the gingerbread - I like this one - was to be all mouth and no trousers. Trumperiness, incudentally, is a modern version of that - not a modern version, it's quite old, but you might think it's got a modern resonance. But there is another word based on a commodity that took a downward turn from something very precious to something quite shoddy. And its story is slightly better known. It goes back to Etheldreda, who was one of the five daughters of the king of East Angles in Suffolk. She was nicknamed Audrey and she founded a religious community at Ely, and the Norman cathedral still stand there on the site of the abbey that she built. She eventually died of the tumour of her throat and she blamed this affliction as punishment for earlier vanity because she loved wearing quite fancy, fine necklaces. Audrey later bacame a saint, and on the 17th October each yearher saint's day was marked with a lot of feasting and fun and fairs - definitely fairs. And at these fairs were sold laces and sort of fringes for wearing about the neck, if you like, in Audrey's honour. Ther were St Audrey's laces, which became shortened to tawdry-laces and that, of course, is how English came to adopt the adjective tawdry, meaning something that looks pretty good on the outside, but it's actually pretty cheap.