pique-nique

Pique-nique first appeared in French around 1692. The pique may come from piquer, to pick or peck at food. The nique is harder to pin down — it may be a rhyming reduplication, a common pattern in French slang. The original meaning had nothing to do with parks or blankets. A pique-nique was a meal where each guest contributed a dish or a bottle. It was a potluck, held indoors, usually at someone's house.

English borrowed the word as 'picnic' by the mid-1700s. In 1802, a group of wealthy Londoners founded the Pic-Nic Society, which met at the Tottenham Street rooms to stage amateur theatricals and share brought-in suppers. The Times covered it. The word was fashionable. But the Pic-Nic Society ate indoors, in a rented hall, under chandeliers.

The shift to outdoor eating happened gradually through the 1800s. The Romantic movement's enthusiasm for nature made eating outside fashionable among the middle classes. Edouard Manet painted Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe in 1863 — a picnic scene that scandalized Paris for reasons unrelated to the food. By the late nineteenth century, 'picnic' had fully detached from its potluck meaning and attached to its outdoor one.

The indoor origin is now completely forgotten. Nobody who spreads a blanket on grass thinks they are participating in a seventeenth-century French potluck tradition. The word kept its sound and lost its meaning entirely, replacing it with a new one that nobody planned.