MIDDLESBROUGH’S new signing, Gaston Ramirez, has both delighted and surprised me. Delighted, because he comes from the town of Fray Bentos – “the kitchen of the world”; and surprised, because he is Uruguayan.

In my supreme ignorance, I’d always assumed Fray Bentos, the home of corned beef, was in Argentina, the home of the beef ranch. I’m not the only one. In 1993, the then Sunderland manager Terry Butcher was discussing Maradona’s “hand of god” goal which knocked England out of the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, and he said: "I don't like Argentina and I never will. I even sent back my Fray Bentos tins after Mexico.”

The Uruguayans wouldn’t have understood Mr Butcher’s protest when the tinsy turned up, because the town of Fray Bentos is a few miles from the Argentinian border. It takes its name from Friar Benedict, who was a reclusive 17th Century priest who lived nearby.

It hit the big time in the pre-refrigeration days of 1863. There were huge herds of cows roaming South America too far away to be fresh when they reached the European market.

So the Liebig’s Extract of Meat Company despatched a contingent of British workers – 42 of whom died in a cholera epidemic – to build a factory at Fray Bentos to produce beef extract. The extract was a thick, black spread that brought the taste of beef to the European masses, and was advertised as a cheap, nutritional alternative to meat.

In 1873, the Fray Bentos factory found a new way of preserving beef – it ground corns of rock salt into the meat to create corned beef, which it shipped to Europe in tins for generations of people like Mr Butcher to enjoy, even if they don’t know precisely where it comes from.

And then, in 1899, the factory developed another product. It discovered that if it dried and powdered its original beef extract it could be sold in cubes as Oxo – so named because it came from an ox. This was advertised enormously in the first years of the 20th Century and in 1908 in London, Oxo became one of the first companies to sponsor an Olympic Games and it provided all the marathon runners with energy-boosting Oxo drinks.

So you can see why I was so delighted to learn that Mr Ramirez was born in Fray Bentos. And should Middlesbrough’s new player ever miss an open goal, I look forward to the match report that says that the man from the home of corned beef has made a hash of it.

IT was good to see the word “pyjamas” getting a good run in big letters on the front of The Northern Echo this week, in connection with the pyjama drama – or “pyjamagate”, as some are calling it, or “slummymummies” as some are tweeting about it – at Darlington’s Skerne Park primary school.

Pyjamas is a strange-looking word which belies is exotic origins: it probably comes from Persian where “pa” means “leg” and “jama” means “clothing”. To us, it is a colonial word, from when we first encountered people on the Indian sub-continent wearing their cool, loose trousers, tied at the waist. It is first recorded in English in 1801, although it didn’t come to mean sleeping attire until the 1870s. There is no record of it ever meaning schoolrun garb.

Other words that we’ve borrowed from Persian include shawl, cummerbund (a “loin band”), possibly orange and lemon, and definitely dervish – “a poor Muslim friar”, which may bring us back to Friar Benedict in Fray Bentos.