Grimer Girl here, I'm Mignon Fuggedy and you can think of me as your friendly guide to

the English language.

Writing, history, rules, and cool stuff.

Today I have a follow-up on the word despumate.

Some follow-up answers to apostrophe questions, and a meaty middle about words that are spelled

the same, but sound different, like invalid and invalid.

I got an interesting comment from a listener named Louis.

He says that the familect word in episode 683, despumate, rang a bell for him.

Here's a brief recap of the story from Bruce Suckerman.

And we have a word we use in the kitchen all the time, the verb is despumate.

And something that needs to despumate on the stove means it needs to sit and cook longer

than in order to get better.

The classic example of food that needs to despumate is something that you cook like a soup

or a stew, then you put it in the refrigerator overnight and then you reheated.

It needed to despumate in order to taste better than it did the first time.

Bruce said he didn't know where the word came from, but Louis said, quote, it made me

think of the Spanish word as spuma for foam or scum.

This prompted me to look it up and what do you know, an archaic verb to remove scum,

unquote.

Now, I'm not suggesting that Bruce's soups are scum, but when I cook soup for a long

time, like turkey soup after Thanksgiving, I end up repeatedly removing something that

looks a lot like foamy scum from the top.

...