Soup

A new take on soup this morning, taken from the current Maigret story, La Patience de Maigret, the one immediately after the one noticed at reference 2.

The wife of one of the villains excuses the behaviour of her husband, explaining that he is really a decent chap, despite being a bit of a soupe au lait, which Larousse tells me is a vernacular term for someone who easily loses his temper.

From where I associate to our own 'milksop', meaning someone who is a bit wet, a bit weak, only used, I think, of a youth or a man. OED gives the word about four column inches, in the course of which we learn that a milksop is a bit of bread softened in milk (that is to say, 'lait'), then a baby yet without teeth who is fed on such stuff, then a male adult who behaves like a baby, in the sense of being docile, easily led and easily frightened.

While 'sop' by itself gets near two columns and while a lot of it is about softening bread in some liquid or other, perhaps wine, perhaps milk, one of the meanings is a compact body of fighting men, perhaps a squad of Saxons making up a small shield wall on top of a hill. Related to both sup and soup, but it is a bit of a stretch to suppose that this is where the bad temper of the French comes from.

PS: the right answer came to me later, on the Ewell Village clockwise. People who speak the vernacular probably consume a lot of milk, then as now a fairly cheap food, and would know all about how easily milk and milk mixtures, like milk soup (perhaps cream of something soup in Heinz speak) can boil over.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/09/soup.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/08/cryptogram.html.