Kicking or punching the bladder, or ball, was permitted, as was doing the same to your opponents …these medieval matches were chaotic and had very few rules. Medieval or mob football was often played between neighbouring towns and villages, with a mass of players from opposing teams clashing to deliver an inflated pigs bladder from one end of town to the other. The history of football being played in England dates back many centuries. By standardising the many different rules that existed at that time, the great public schools of England could at last compete with each other on a fair and level playing field. "It would only whet the appetite of Bonaparte and increafe ftill more the dangers of invafion.Although there have been games recorded around the world involving balls being kicked around a field, the modern rules of Association Football, aka soccer, can be traced back to mid-19th century England. " seekes new wayes to whet dull appetite."īy the early 19th century the phrase had begun to be used figuratively to refer to sharpening the appetite for things other than food, as here in a report from The Times, May 1801: Come on I love a Whett."Ī more explicit use is in Thomas Dekker's If it be not good, the diuel is in it, 1612: It is first alluded to in Thomas Shadwell's The Squire of Alsatia, 1688: Added to that is the 18th century habit of serving liqueurs as hors d'oeuvre - in that case literally wetting the appetite (they also served turnips as appetizers - thankfully we have moved on).Īlthough not as old as 'wet your whistle', 'whet your appetite' has been in the language for some time. The assumption that 'whet' and 'wet' are the same word is thus encouraged. Whetstones were normally constructed with a water bath or some form of drip on to the stone. Also, when tools are ground on whetstones they need to be lubricated with water or oil to prevent overheating. Whet is no longer a common word, whereas its homonym 'wet' obviously is. The spelling as 'wet your appetite' is quite understandable. If you would like to dispel some popular fallacies you could try life in the 1500s or the Nonsense Nine.īack to whet/wet your appetite/whistle. As French wine growers used to say when complaining of inferior wines that were labelled as the prestigious Appelation Controllé - "the paper never refuses the ink". That form of digitally enhanced folk etymology is called netymology. The Internet makes it easy to circulate information unfortunately it isn't discriminating and stories like that tend to gain a foothold quite quickly. You may see it put about that 'wet your whistle' derives from the practice of using a whistle in the taverns of Olde Englande to summon the landlord with more drinks. Whistle here means throat or voice and the phrase just means 'take a drink'. DULY NOTED ORIGIN FULL"Had She oones Wett Hyr Whystyll She couth Syng full clere Hyr pater noster." 'Wet your whistle' pre-dates 'whet your appetite' by some centuries, and was first recorded in the 1386 Towneley Mysteries: So, 'whetting our appetite' is 'sharpening our appetite'. The allusion in the former is to the sharpening of tools on a whetstone (grindstone) and to whet means just to sharpen. In fact there's no connection between the two terms, which are properly spelled as 'whet your appetite' and 'wet your whistle'. Uncertainty about the spelling of the first word, either as whet or wet, leads to both phrases being wrongly spelled too. This phrase is often confused with 'wet your whistle'. What's the origin of the phrase 'Whet your appetite'? To have your interest in something, especially food, stimulated.
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