How about some breakfast?
After a good eight or so hours of sleep, many people are ready to pull up a chair to the groaning board for a surfeit of collops. Er, that is, many people are ready to sit at the dining room table to eat a good breakfast of bacon and eggs. “Collops” comes from the 1300s, and it’s based on the Old Norse “kalops,” which is a meat stew. “Collops” is still in occasional use today, but only as a regional expression in England. As for the “groaning board”, that also dates to the middle ages, and simply refers to putting such a big feast on the (wooden) table that it creaks.
There are multitudes of regional idioms for food, from the deli sandwiches called (depending on where you live) “subs,” “hoagies,” “grinders,” “heroes,” “filled rolls,” “wedges,” “poorboys,” “Italian sandwiches,” or “spukies.” There are at least as many terms for types of eating. A “vegetarian” eats vegetables, of course, and a “carnivore” eats meat. But if you’re “cepivorous,” you dine on onions.
There are various edible parts of trees — depending on your species, of course, the whole thing might be edible. A single grove of trees can provide sustenance for “fructivores” (who are “carpophagous” because they eat fruit) and “granivores,” who like the seeds. The sap is the treat for the “gumnivorous” set, and whoever is “hylophagous” or “xylophagous” is munching on the wood itself. They’ll probably avoid the leaves, which is just the way the “foliophagous” (or “phyllophagous”) eaters prefer it. Anything left over after this crowd is done is probably just left to decay — by which time it’s a feast for any “detritivore” who happens along. But we didn’t account for the roots — but that’s no matter; the “radicivores” (those who are “rhizophagous”) will take care of them.
If one is afflicted with “chthonophagia,” you eat dirt. If you’re really dedicated to the practice, chances are you’ll come across some unique rocks during dinner. For instance, you might find an “aerolith,” which is a meteorite (a “lith,” or stone, that comes from the sky). But you might instead run across some other sorts of liths, possibly including an “amphibiolith” (a fossil of an amphibian) or a “laccolith”, which is an igneous rock between two sedimentary layers. “Igneous” rocks are the ones created in extreme heat, such as in a volcano. The word is based on the Latin word for fire, “ignis.” Formation of “sedimentary” rocks doesn’t involve heat but often does have to do with pressure; a layer of some sort of deposit, from mud to sand to the decaying vegetation preferred by detrivores. When the deposits get compacted together firmly enough, over time (a lot of time) they form rocks. It’s not clear why, but people began referring to “igneous” rocks in the 1600s, but took another two centuries to realize there were also such things as “sedimentary” rocks.
Some rocks are classified by their shape rather than their composition. For instance, a “cyclolith” is a circular rock. Leaving the “rock” or “lith” part off opens up hundreds of other words that refer to shapes, whether rock or not. Something that’s “cordate,” for example, is heart-shaped. Anything that’s “cyathiform” is shaped like a cup, even if it’s made of something decidedly un-cuplike, such as a pile of raisins stuck carefully together. There are even “shape” words for things that don’t seem to have an obvious shape of their own, like seaweed. While it’s not clear to me quite what shape seaweed has, anything that IS that shape is “fucoid,” and something that’s shaped like a gas (which would seem kind of impossible, really), is “gasiform.”
Anything shaped like a berry is “bacciform”, and would at least initially appeal to a “baccivore.” Anybody in that category might be pleased to sit down at the groaning board to a serving of strawberries on an “archaeolithic” “melliform” device — which would be an ancient man-made stone plate. But even baccivores would want to make sure they weren’t fooled by a plate of “lithocarps.” Those fossilized fruits can be so convincing…
