They’re Piping Hot! But How Hot is “Piping?”

There you are, sitting down to breakfast. Your private chef enters the breakfast room (which you, of course, have) bearing a basket holding something that smells wonderful wrapped in the sort of colorful cloth personal chefs wrap baked goods in. At my place it’s a clean dish towel, but your chef will have whatever’s the linen item de rigeur.

With a flourish she sets the basket on the table, unfolds the cloth and carefully lifts a perfectly-crafted fresh muffin with her serving tongs and sets it on your plate.

“Piping hot chocolate chip pumpkin muffins. Buon appetito!” she says, and withdraws to begin drawing up the day’s luncheon menu.

You eye the muffin, sniff the aroma wafting off it, and lift it toward you, anticipating a tasty breakfast treat. Halfway to your mouth, your hand stops. You give that bit of bakery goods another look and ponder.

Why yes, this muffin is hot. But why is it “piping hot?”

The very same thing happened at breakfast at Rancho Retro recently — except for the breakfast room, private chef, wicker basket and tongs portions.

Rather than leave you pondering there with your hot muffin cooling quickly, I’ll explain as briefly as possible, and then let you eat while I elaborate.

“Piping hot” has some years on it. It’s not advertising hype invented for a marketing campaign in recent times. It’s been around since English was Middle English, late in the 14th century.

You’ve probably figured it out. Extremely hot food is as hot as something sizzling in a pan over high heat, making a sound that might — to the imaginative — resemble the tootling of pipes. It’s an odd example of metonymy in which the sound of something hot is used to describe a hot object. Unusual, but memorably graphic. So memorable, in fact, that we’ve kept using the phrase for so many hundreds of years that we’ve lost sight of the original association. “Piping hot” now simply means really hot.

Go ahead and start eating your muffin if you wish. A brief observation.

When I went to find out how the phrase one of us used that morning came about, it was easy to find both the meaning as well as its first recorded use in English. As with many other Middle English words, the first recorded instance was in a collection of stories titled, The Canterbury Tales.

The Tales runs about 12,000 lines, a work of considerable size. Chaucer was highly literate and well educated. He was also working in a time from which our records of the language are limited. His work was enormously popular, and survived in multiple copies and editions. We’re fortunate to have it, because he was writing English during a time of radical change in the language. He, himself, was an innovator, and almost certainly coined some of the words and phrases. More important is the fact that he recorded the language being spoken at the time, capturing innumerable words for the first time.

Chaucer wrote a large number of works in addition to the Tales. All told, his manuscripts record approximately 2,000 English words for the first time. “Piping” and “piping hot” are among them.

Here’s Chaucer’s use of “piping hot” in line 193 of “The Miller’s Tale,” rendered in modern English:

“Wafers piping hot out of the glede (coals).”

If one’s in the habit of looking up word derivations in the Oxford English Dictionary, Chaucer pops up repeatedly. It was no surprise to encounter him again, but always a pleasure.

Buon appetito!

© Brad Nixon 2018. Piping hot muffin and coffee photo © M. Vincent 2018, used by kind permission. The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 1971.