brownie

The name is simply brown plus the diminutive -ie, a little brown thing, and every other meaning of the word grows from that same small coinage. Usually it is counted, as in a brownie or a plate of brownies. It can also be treated as a substance, as when a character in Elizabeth Stuckey-French's "The Visible Man" (2000) is served "a hunk of brownie". Chocolate brownie is the fuller name when the flavor needs saying.

The lowercase spelling of the rank for the youngest Girl Guides or Girl Scouts, whose usual form is Brownie with a capital. The name borrows the helpful elf for small, useful girls. Dutch does the same thing: kabouter, literally "gnome," names the very young members of its scout movement.

Originally a Scots figure, and the sense behind the word's folklore meanings. The stories turn on etiquette. Thomas Keightley's Fairy Mythology (1828) warns that offering a brownie bread, drink or a new coat and hood would insult him and might drive him off for good. Cream and fresh honeycomb, left quietly in a private corner, were welcome. Keightley writes Brownie almost as a name, capitalized; modern writers simply count them.

In pagan usage the word moves from story into practice. The brownie becomes a spirit belonging to the home, or a revered ancestor, and is honored rather than merely told about. That separates it from the helpful elf of folktale, who is a character in a narrative. Here the brownie is a presence a household keeps faith with.

Bush fare of Australia and New Zealand, eaten with tea at stockmen's huts and in shearing-time breaks. Writers of the 1890s still explained it for their readers. E. Davenport Cleland's The White Kangaroo (1890) calls it cake "of flour, fat, and sugar, commonly known as browny." Unlike the chocolate square, it is a mass noun: you eat a piece or a hunk of brownie, not a brownie.

Everyday talk in Australia and New Zealand, named for the brown glass rather than for anything inside the bottle. It belongs to casual speech, not formal writing. The sentence has to make the drinking clear, as in a cold brownie or an empty one, or a hearer may think of the chocolate square. The same two countries also use the word for a currant bread.

An ethnic slur that turns the word's diminutive against people. The -ie that makes a cake or an elf small and harmless here serves to belittle. It is offensive in any context. It belongs in reports of abuse, not in description, and anyone who needs to refer to skin color should use plain, neutral language instead.

A trawler's nickname that travels in a pair. R. Quentin Grafton, Harry W. Nelson and Bruce Turris (2007) name "greenies and brownies" among the rockfish species fished with mid-water trawls rather than along the ocean floor. Because the same informal word also means the brown trout, the setting does the work: a brownie in a river is a trout, and one in a mid-water trawl is a rockfish.