Mary O'Callaghan wrote to me from London to tell me that her father, a Corkman, always called a kettle a dixie. She would like to know where the word originated. She has a feeling that it is an American word, connected with Dixieland, the deep south.
I wonder was Mary's father an old soldier? It is certainly a soldier's word, and it reached Cork courtesy of the Munster Fusiliers from India. It meant, as Mary says, a kettle, or pot, made of iron, and used to make either tea or stew. It's in Hindi as degchi, and that word was adopted once upon a time from the Persian degcha, diminutive of deg, an iron pot, cauldron or kettle.
The other Dixie is, Oxford insists, of obscure origin, and leaves it at that. It bids us consult Matthews's Dictionary of American Speech if we have a mind to, implying, I feel, that we shouldn't bother. One theory is that the word derives from Jeremiah Dixon, who, with Charles Mason, drew the Mason-Dixon line between Maryland and Pennsylvania. Another guess is more interesting. Some southerners like to trace the word's origin from the $10 bills issued by a Louisiana bank, which in un-American fashion, carried the French word Dix (10) stamped prominently on the back. At any rate, the word first appeared in public in the famous song by D.D Emmet, Dixie's Land, written in 1858: `In Dixie's Lann whar I was bawn in, Arly on one frosty mawnin . . .' At least it has a rousing air to it, and I'm reliably informed that ole George Dubya used to sing it rather well in the bars of Texas before he found The Light.
Spring brings thoughts of the garden. My daughter is thinking of planting amaranths, also known as love-lies-bleeding. I've read that the word comes from the Greek anthos, a flower. No. It is from French amarante, itself from Latin amarantus, from Greek amarantos, which means "unfading".
Drummond of Hawthornden, in 1616, first used the word as a poetic conception for an unfading flower: "Upon her head she ware of amaranthus a crown." Milton followed. Lycidas has: "Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed." To Spenser the flower was simply a flower, and I don't think he liked it: "Sad Amaranthus, in whose purple gore Me seemes I see Aninta's wretched fate."
In 1555 the celebrated herbalist Turner said that an amaranth was "more a purple eare" than a flower. Anyway, success to Aifric. May her amaranths never fade.