Mardi Gras parade, New Orleans
Photograph: Dan Chung
The English definitely have the worst names for Shrove Tuesday or pancake day. Latin Americans and southern Europeans have "carnival", from a Latin or Italian word meaning "putting away of meat", and the more enlightened north Americans have Mardi Gras - fat Tuesday. Both or them, intrinsically and by association, conjure up a far greater sense of fun than our obsession with icky batter wraps.
The Shrove in Shrove Tuesday comes from an archaic word for confession, and although it's true it doesn't prompt one to think of gyroscopically-waisted dancing girls, is at least of etymological interest. To shrive was formerly what a priest did when hearing confessions. The word has mostly disappeared from use, due in no small part to the hearing of confession becoming markedly less fashionable on this island after all that Reformation business. But it has left two intriguing remnants, like rockpools created by a receding tide.
Shrove Tuesday is one of them, from the practice of going to confession, and being "shriven", before Lent. At least, it seems highly improbable that its etymology could be anything else; the OED notes that although a noun "shrove" from the verb "shrive" is perfectly plausible, no evidence for the word emerges until the 15th century, which the OED finds "remarkable". Shrive itself comes ultimately from a Germanic root related to the Latin scribere, to write. In English - but not in most of the other Germanic languages - the word came to mean "to assign penance", and therefore to hear confession and give absolution.
The other remnant, which one might not immediately connect with Shrove Tuesday is shrift, a noun from shrive meaning, as Collins puts it, "the act or instance of shriving or being shriven". Collins, incidentally, differs from the OED in deriving shrive directly from Latin scriptum, written. Are we to understand that medieval priests had a written list of the penances to be imposed for a list of sins? Shrift, of course, only survives in the fixed expression "short shrift", which the OED says was originally "a brief space of time allowed for a criminal to make his confession before execution".
None of which, I think, disproves my original point. Pancakes? Hanged men? Obscure papist rites? You can keep it. Bring on the dancing girls.
