It's from an older slangish word, "Alboche", which perversely mingled the French word for German (Allemand) and a quite pejorative word for "head" (caboche), with connotations that there's not much in it. It's supposed to date back from after the 1870 French defeat. "boche" was a shorter word but still very pejorative.
Apparently "caboche" is an old word from Northern French dialect which was imported by the English who transformed it into "cabbage".
In modern French i don't know of any extant cabbage connection, but i wonder why the English would have borrowed that word. I don't know either if the cabbage connection was extant in the 1870's. The etymology of caboche is Latin caput according to my dictionary.
A link on front slang, for anyone interested: http://faculty.ed.umuc.edu/~rschumak/essay5.htm (by Ann P. Linder)
Could there be a suitably bad pun about maize and the Lunars?
Jerome
--__--__--
Powered by hypermail