USn's will celebrate their Thanksgiving holiday next week, with its traditionally sumptuous family meal. Wordcraft honors that holiday by devoting this week's theme to words of the feast.

provender – food or provisions (also, dry food for livestock, such as hay
[from Latin præbenda things to be furnished (præ- before + habere to hold), influenced by provide]

Ogden Nash tells of a fancy double-date in The Private Dining Room.

Miss Rafferty wore taffeta,
Miss Cavendish wore lavender
We ate pickerel and mackerel
And other lavish provender.
Miss Cavendish was Lalage,
Miss Rafferty was Barbara.
We gobbled pickled mackerel
And broke the candelabra
…
Miss Rafferty wore taffeta,
The taffeta was lavender
Was lavend, lavender, lavendest
As the wine improved the provender.
…
Miss Rafferty in taffeta,
Grew definitely raffisher.
Miss Cavendish in lavender
Grew less and less stand-offfisher.
… But lavender and taffeta
Were gone when we were soberer.
I haven't thought for thirty years
Of Lalage and Barbara.

Bonus word:
raffish – marked 1. by flashy vulgarity or crudeness; tawdry; or 2. by careless unconventionality; rakish

Related to "prebend," the income from an estate.

Ambrose Bierce defined "to eat" as meaning "to perform successively (and successfully) the functions of mastication, humectation, and deglutition." We'll look at the first of these today, with the other two to follow.

masticate – to chew (food) [also, to grind and knead (rubber, for example) into a pulp]

Did you know it takes 133 chews to masticate a small Triscuit?
– Erma Bombeck, Forever, Erma

Perhaps I should have saved masticate for a theme of "Words that Sound Dirty, but Aren't". Here's an example.

. . .But when he went to the college the next morning, Annie's office was locked
. . ."Where's Professor Knowles today, he asked Charlotte, the department secretary.
. . ."Called in sick."
. . ."Oh? We were supposed to have lunch today."
. . .Charlotte gazed up at him. "Lunch?" Her big brown eyes widened suggestively. He didn't appreciate the suggestion.
. . ."Yes, Charlotte, we were going to masticate together."
. . .Charlotte's face simmered. "Oh?"
. . ."You might want to look it up." He grinned. "Masticate."
. . .She gulped. "OK."
– Elizabeth Brundage, The Doctor's Wife (ellipses omitted)

to eat – to perform successively (and successfully) the functions of mastication, humectation, and deglutition

masticate [discussed yesterday] – to chew (food)
humectation – the act of moistening
deglutition – the act of swallowing
(The verb forms humect, humectate and deglute are "now rare" or "obsolete", says OED.)

Humectation is rare, but humectant (a substance used to reduce the loss of moisture) has become much more common in the last decade or so. Deglutition is also rare, but I found nice figurative usages in a classic, and in a Thanksgiving-Day story about "deglutition" in a marriage.

A course of humectant, exfoliating creams, and cell refreshant night masks would go some way to improving general skin tone, but very little could be done to help the folds of double chin and the dull glaze over the eyes.
– Stephen Fry, Revenge: A Novel

True, generous feeling is made small account of by some …. Feeling without judgment is a washy draught indeed; but judgment untempered by feeling is too bitter and husky a morsel for human deglutition.
– Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

. . .It was Thanksgiving evening, that sweet peaceful time after the dishes are washed and put away, and the turkey soup is simmering on the back of the stove, when Sally's husband, Dave, told her that their marriage felt like a snake around his neck, and he wanted a divorce.
. . ."Dave just said our marriage was cold dead weight on his shoulders, like a snake," [Sally tells her sister. That night, s]he crept … downstairs to the encyclopedias on the bottom shelf of the bookcase. "All snakes are carnivorous and as a rule take living prey only," she read. … "The prey is always swallowed entire, and, as its girth generally much exceeds that of the snake, the progress of deglutition is very laborious and slow."
– The Progress of Deglutition, in Nothing with Strings [etc.] by Bailey White

This message has been edited. Last edited by: wordcrafter,

ingurgitate – (literal or figurative) 1. to swallow food or drink greedily; to gulp down; to "pig out" 2. to eat or drink to excess

So say the dictionaries. But it seems to me in actual use, the term implies being forced to swallow something disagreeable, to have it "shoved down your throat".

Having accepted humiliation in [the Munich Agreement of] September 1938, it seems that there was no end to the humble pie the democracies would ingurgitate. On March 22 Lithuania was forced to cede Memel to Germany; on April 7 Mussolini, not to be outdone by his ally, invaded Albania.
– Eugen Joseph Weber, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s

"In the first place, the U. S. cocktail hour is much too long but quite necessary as it gets the guests inebriated enough to ingurgitate the unsavory mess the hostess sets on a blob of rice in each plate."
– Charleston (WV) Daily Mail, Aug. 29, 1962, quoting a pompous gourmet

quote:

Eugen Joseph Weber

Americans may be familiar with the late Prof. Weber from his excellent series The Western Tradition on public television.

Here's a word you can drop into Thanksgiving Day celebrations. It can be remembered because it's related to razor, in that each comes from a root meaning "to scrape".

rasorial – related to birds that scratch the ground for their food – such as the turkey, who is the "guest of honor" at the Thanksgiving feast. Other rasorial birds are the chicken, partridge, grouse, quail, and peacock.

They looked toward the door, saw only the paunchy guest of the evening moving toward it, in an unsteady rasorial attitude as though following a trail of crumbs to the great world outside.
– William Gaddis, The Recognitions

For your Thanksgiving feast, I wish you the good form of satiety. As the Romans said, "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we diet." May you and your turkey each be well-stuffed.

satiate (noun form satiety) – 1. to satisfy (an appetite or desire) fully 2. to satisfy to excess

Usually used in either a blood-thirsty sense or a sexual sense. For example:

[The dæmon speaks:] "How dare you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you …; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends."
– Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

She sat up. The bedclothes slipped from her breasts as she kissed him softly, sighing with satiated pleasure.
– Herman Wouk, The Winds of War