A flap by any other name

We woke this morning to a tale of flapjacks, with a flapjack being included in the handbag of a suspect in an Agatha mystery. BH thought was that a smart young lady would not keep a flapjack in her handbag and that actually it was thirties slang for a powder compact, one of those slim round jobs with a click open lid with a mirror inside. A task which still exists, in that girls on the tube still do it, but the gadget has moved on.

So off to the OED (first edition), which tells a tale of pancakes, with the term gradually broadening out to include the baked item we call a flapjack here in England. Students in the US would nip out to the flapjack, by which they meant the pancake house, an example of the US preserving an old meaning for a word, an old meaning which we have lost. So perhaps the young lady in question had a wrapped flapjack, what one might now call a granola bar, in her handbag as a standby snack, not wanting to spend her valuable time & money on a proper meal. She was not particularly well off, only being on the aeroplane of the story as a result of winning the sweepstake at the flower shop where she worked.

There was also the snippet that the flap bit of flapjack came from the flip of flipping the pancake.

BH, however, persisted with powder compacts, to the point of getting her Concise Oxford down, where in two lines it mentioned both the small round pancake and the powder compact - but not our sort of flapjack at all. This dictionary dating from around 1960, while mine dated from around 1900. Somewhat put out, I consult my Shorter Oxford, also from around 1960 (at least revised up to that point, having been first published in 1933), and no powder compact. So how did this more or less slang meaning creep into the small Concise Oxford while it was left out of the roughly contemporary & large Shorter Oxford. Was the Concise targeting the sort of people who might use slang of that sort?

We then moved onto jack, a word for which the OED had all kinds of interesting meanings. Starting out as a working person, a sort of lower labourer, then moving onto the various contraptions which might be used to replace such a person, then contraptions generally. So a flapjack was a kitchen utensil for turning over cakes which were being fried in a fying pan. Then the thing that was so turned. Then they added syrup and moved to the oven, giving us the current English meaning.

Next stop râblé from my new Simenon, the origin of which seems to be to do with rabbits, but is now something to do with backs. From where I associate to the fact that the lower back of rabbits, about where the tenderloin would be in a pig, is the best cut. Cut crosswise, and I am now not sure whether you get one or two of them to the rabbit.