Mind your language
IT IS annoying to find people writing letters about the English language and getting it wrong; it is even more annoy- ing to me when they are men, as Dr Kim Davis may well be. He wrote a let- ter last week claiming that in food writ- ing recipe is 'sound Middle English' and receipt is 'an affectation'.
How wrong can you get? The Oxford English Dictionary gives its earliest cita- tion of recipe in this sense from Horace Walpole in 1743. That is not the period of Middle English. In its definition, the dictionary says helpfully: 'a receipt'. Receipt is used by Chaucer, who is a Middle English writer. Chaucer spelled the word differently, as he did many others. The p was inserted by later ety- mologising spelling masters. Of course both words derive from the Latin recipere.
Myself, I'm all for variety: a receipt for satisfaction.
Dot Wordsworth
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