Origin and history of pasty

a generic name for Italian dough-based foods such as spaghetti, macaroni, etc., 1874, but not common in English until after World War II, from Italian pasta, from Late Latin pasta "dough, pastry cake, paste," from Greek pasta "barley porridge," probably originally "a salted mess of food," from neuter plural of pastos (adj.) "sprinkled, salted," from passein "to sprinkle," from PIE root *kwet- "to shake" (see quash).

c. 1300 (mid-12c. as a surname), "dough for the making of bread or pastry," from Old French paste "dough, pastry" (13c., Modern French pâte), from Late Latin pasta "dough, pastry cake, paste" (see pasta). Meaning "glue mixture, dough used as a plaster seal" is attested from c. 1400; broader sense of "a composition just moist enough to be soft without liquefying" is by c. 1600. In reference to a kind of heavy glass made of ground quartz, etc., often used to imitate gems, by 1660s.

very common adjective suffix, "full of, covered with, or characterized by" the thing expressed by the noun, Middle English -i, from Old English -ig, from Proto-Germanic *-iga-, from PIE -(i)ko-, adjectival suffix, cognate with elements in Greek -ikos, Latin -icus (see -ic). Germanic cognates include Dutch, Danish, German -ig, Gothic -egs.

It was used from 13c. with verbs (drowsy, clingy), and by 15c. with other adjectives (crispy). Chiefly with monosyllables; with more than two the effect tends to become comedic.

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Variant forms in -y for short, common adjectives (vasty, hugy) helped poets after the loss of grammatically empty but metrically useful -e in late Middle English. Verse-writers adapted to -y forms, often artfully, as in Sackville's "The wide waste places, and the hugy plain." (and the huge plain would have been a metrical balk).

After Coleridge's criticism of it as archaic artifice, poets gave up stilly (Moore probably was last to make it work, with "Oft in the Stilly Night"), paly (which Keats and Coleridge himself had used) and the rest.

Jespersen ("Modern English Grammar," 1954) also lists bleaky (Dryden), bluey, greeny, and other color words, lanky, plumpy, stouty, and the slang rummy. Vasty survives, he writes, only in imitation of Shakespeare; cooly and moisty (Chaucer, hence Spenser) he regards as fully obsolete. But in a few cases he notes (haughty, dusky) they seem to have supplanted shorter forms.