The world loses a non-snob

Oh crud. I finally hear of a cooking authority who stresses adaptability and improvisation, and who works with the idea that time, money, and energy all have limits... in other words, it sounds to me like he's the exact opposite of a snob... and the reason I'm hearing about him is because he has passed away. Dangit!!

[nb: I know squat about this person other than what a few other people wrote about him here on LJ today.]

Wordplay

[Poll #1100080]

I was something like thirty-eight when I had a sudden insight that these words might be related. I felt phenomenally stupid for not having seen it before. It's not like I've never studied a Romance language or somehow never in my life encountered that scent for soap.

Then I started telling friends, and so far, they've all responded with variants of "What do you mean, obvious? How the @#$! would you come up with something like that? Weirdo."

This is the kind of thing I wonder about a lot. Is there any relationship between the endings of "lavender" and "provender"? How many pairs of words used to follow the pattern "bear"/"birth" (verb -> vowel change + "th" -> noun) before we dropped those usages, and just how much does "death" count as one of the last remaining examples? If a pantler had charge of the pantry (bread = pan), and a hostler worked at a hostelry, did a butler (bottles, wine) ever at any time in the language have anything like a "butry", and are "gentry" or "gantry" even remotely related to this pattern?

Um, sorry, I'm just kind of like this. :-)