If you are wondering what to have for supper, consider this recipe from the 1300s:
“Take a leg of mutton freshly cooked, and chop it as finely as possible in a dish of onions. Stew these ingredients with a little verjuice [the sour juice of unripe grapes], butter, and ground white ginger mixed together and seasoned with salt.”
This dish is called gallimaufry [gal-le-MAW-free], which today is a culinary term for a type of meat stew. However, gallimaufry is more often used in the sense of an unorganized collection of unrelated things.
The desk was covered with a gallimaufry of items, few of which seemed to have anything to do with work.
Or, as a commenter on a blog said, “This morning my mind is a gallimaufry of chess, bills, weekend plans, and laundry.”
A certain website does a yearly round-up of odds and ends and calls it a gallimaufry, which it says is “A half-[bottomed], in-pieces round-up of [stuff] we can’t even be bothered to examine as a whole. “
In the business section of the LA Times, there is this from 2014: “And Bernard Baumohl of the Global Economic Outlook Group said: ‘We got a gallimaufry of sentiments in five paragraphs that delicately tiptoes around the issue of when short term rates should begin to normalize.'”
Gallimaufry is fun to say, but not everyone thinks it useful. Riju Datta, a sixth-grader from Florida who competed in the 2014 Scripps National Spelling Bee, said, “Sometimes German and French words are words that just sound fancy. Like gallimaufry. You could just say you have a lot of jumbled stuff, you wouldn’t really need to say you have a gallimaufry.”
So, a gallimaufry is a hodgepodge. A mishmash. A mixed bag. A potpourri. A stew. A jumble. An omnium-gatherum.
Wait. A what?
Omnium-gatherum. The first word is Latin, meaning of all or belonging to all. The second word is gather with um tacked on to make it sound Latin. The earliest use of omnium-gatherum dates back to the 1500s.
An omnium (minus the gatherum) is a bicycle race that’s held on a track and has six events: flying lap, points race, elimination, individual pursuit, scratch race and time trial.
I’m not a metal kind of guy, but there’s a band from Finland called Omnium Gatherum whose music is referred to as melodic death-metal. I like it.
Having mentioned Omnium Gatherum, I’d be amiss not to also mention a contra dance band from Ohio called Gallimaufry. According to their website, the band creates “a sound that is decidedly unique, unabashedly energetic, and will make you want to do nothing but dance.”
Having a gallimaufry of things to do, I’m not sure it would be wise to listen to a band — despite its name — that will make me want to do nothing but dance.
Being a fan of the TV show, “Doctor Who” (which is about a time-traveler from the planet, Gallifrey), let me conclude with my favorite use of gallimaufry. On the Internet, a commenter said, “A gallimaufry of British actors have portrayed the good Gallifreyan over the years.”
How brilliant is that? If I had a TARDIS, I’d go back in time and say it first.