Veg-Etymology: Linguistic Roots Exposed Quiz

Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts

1. The word "vegetable" was not always stigmatized as an odious idiom used to describe the mentally dull or unresponsive. Once Marvell could use vegetable as a metaphor for love - nourishing, growing, alive - as he did in his poem "To His Coy Mistress". Which other active and lively word(s) evolved from the same Indo-European root as vegetable?

Answer: All of these

According to "Yourdictionary.com", the Indo-European root "weg" gave birth to such diverse words as waken, bivouac and vigor as well as the three words noted above. Vegetable derived from "weg" through the Latin "verge" meaning to be lively. "Yourdictionary.com" further points out that the early usage of the word emphasized its living energy, including Marvell's use of "vegetable" as a metaphor for his love.

"My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow."

Although the health giving aspects of vegetables are still recognized and appreciated, in both the adjective "vegetative" and in the slang use of the noun "vegetable" to indicate a mentally incapacitated person, we see how the word has come to have a new connotation; for now, this once "active and lively" word has come to connote mindlessness and stasis.

2. "I do not like broccoli. And I haven't liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I'm President of the United States and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli." - George H. Bush According to Dictionary.com, this sometimes loathsome and oft times toothsome member of the mustard family (Brassica oleracea) derives its English name from an Italian word for a "flowering sprout of a turnip". The Latin root for this Italian word, "brocchus", originally referred to which particular variety of projections?

Answer: Animal teeth

The Rasenna people (called "Etrusci" by the Romans) came from ancient Turkey bringing broccoli with them. In the first century AD, Pliny the Elder included an entry for broccoli in his 160-volume encyclopedia of natural history. The Latin root "brocchus", which can denote projections other than teeth, also figures into the etymology of the English noun "brocade" and the English verb "broach".

3. The "American Heritage Dictionary" would have us believe that the name of this vegetable is used as a term of endearment. An obscure supplement to the 1961 edition of the "Dictionary of Slang" maintains that the word "kibosh" shares a common Old French root with this vegetable name. The ultimate Latin root means "head". Tell me, mon petit chou, what is the name of this capital vegetable?

Answer: Cabbage

The Old French word "caboche" is the source of the word cabbage. "Caboche" is also the word that hunting parties used as late as Charles Dickens' time to describe the removal of a slain deer's head. Lexicologist Julian Franklyn proposed that it was this practice that Charles Dickens had in mind when Dickens used "kye-bosh" in his "Sketches by Boz". (If true, this etymologic theory would certainly give a sense of finality to the term "kibosh".) In modern French usage "caboche" refers to a snail's head.

The seemingly humble Cabbage holds an important place in mythology, history and medicine. When Dionysus caught Lycurgus trampling grapes, cabbages formed from the tears Lycurgus cried as he awaited his punishment. One could speculate that this story is related to the belief, in ancient times, that cabbage cured drunkenness. In 621 BC, Draco (from whom we derive the term "draconian") made the crime of stealing cabbages punishable by death. Finally, in modern times, cabbage (along with broccoli) has been held to be of benefit in treating exposure to x-radiation (Proc Soc Exp Biol Med. 1959 Feb;100(2):405-7)

For the use of "cabbage" as a term of endearment among English speakers, I find scant evidence. There are, however, ample references to the French employing the phrase "mon petit chou" (my little cabbage) as a term of endearment.

4. Mark Twain opined, "Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education." In a sense, Twain was right. In fact, cauliflower, cabbage, broccoli and kale all stem from the same species of plant, Brassica oleracea. The word cauliflower means literally "flower of the caulis". But what is a caulis?

Answer: A stem

"Caulis", a Latin root, is still in use today with the same meaning: stem. (Admittedly it is not in daily conversational use, but caulis is in my Scrabble dictionary.) Cauliflower is technically Brassica oleracea var. botrytis. "Botyritis" means bunch of grapes and refers to the clustered appearance of a cauliflower head. The cluster of the flowers is in the shape of the Golden Spiral, which is mathematically governed by the Fibonacci series, which Leonardo Fibonacci described in the 13th century.

Catherine de Medici was so enamored with cauliflower that upon marrying the king of France she brought to the court of Henry II cooks skilled in the making of her many beloved cauliflower concoctions. She is credited with popularizing the vegetable in Europe outside of Italian peninsula.

5. The Persian word for this vegetable meant green hand; the Arabs called it "the prince of vegetables". A modern American cartoon hero popped it straight out of the can and into his mouth as a strength-giving tonic. We can only be speaking of which vegetable?

Answer: Spinach

Two cities, each styling itself the "Spinach Capital of the World", sport statutes of Popeye the Sailor Man: Crystal City, Texas and Alma, Arkansas. The latter is the hometown of Popeye brand spinach. But Crystal City Texas has, perhaps, the better claim to spinach supremacy since it has not just one statue of Popeye but two. Chester, Illinois, birthplace of Popeye's creator, Elzie Segar, deserves honorable mention as the town also boasts a Popeye statue, although Chester makes no claims as to spinach superiority.

6. The leaves of the artichoke grow shorter as one moves toward the center of the plant. As a consequence, the barbs on the outer edge of the leaves move ever closer to the edible portion at the other end. Yet, choking on these smaller artichoke leaves doesn't figure into the meaning of "al-aruf", the Arabic word from which "artichoke" ultimately derived, does it?

Answer: No

"Al-aruf" had nothing to do with choking according to "Dictionary.com". The site does explain that mistaken ideas of the word's etymology may have influenced the forms the word ultimately took in English.

"Cynara" is the genus name for artichoke. An ancient legend holds that Zeus first transformed the maiden Cynara into a Goddess, only to later cast her back to earth, changing her into a thistle - quite possibly the artichoke or its ancestor. The modern artichoke was not introduced into England until the reign of Henry VIII. Catherine de Medici's promotion of this vegetable (see also my note on Cauliflower) and the artichoke's purported aphrodisiac properties probably accounted for Henry's personal interest in them. In 1947, a virtually unknown Hollywood starlet was selected as "Miss California Artichoke Queen". It is an open question as to whether Marilyn Monroe promoted the artichoke or vice versa.

7. The etymology of the English word "asparagus" seems, on the surface, to be trivially simple but is deceptively complex. The modern English "asparagus" derives from the Late Middle English "sperage", which in turn originated from the Medieval Latin "sparagus". From what Latin word did "sparagus" originate?

Answer: asparagus

The Greek noun "asparagos" may be related to a Greek verb meaning to swell. One could say that the English "asparagus" derives from the Latin "asparagus" but with a few twists and turns. Having devolved from "asparagus" to "sperage", the word was restored by Latinizing academics who succeeded in gaining acceptance for a return to "asparagus" in the 16th century.

The restored word then gave way to "sparagrass" which mutated into the folksy "sparrowgrass" that is sometimes wrongly assumed to be the root for rather than a derivative of "asparagus".

Another groundswell in favor of academic correctness reestablished "asparagus" in the 19th century.

8. Long ago, on the banks of the river Rha (the modern Volga), barbarian tribes were familiar with a plant with red-green succulent stalks that grew along the river. The plants from the Rha of the barbarians became the Latin "rhabarbarum", root of the modern English "rhubarb". Etymologically, how could the preceding account best be described?

Answer: A widely reported but not solidly proven etymologic explanation

The "Rha-barbarian" explanation would seem to be the most alluring and prevalent explanation for the derivation of "rhubarb". However, some suggest a connection with the Ancient Greek "rheo", which means to flow and could be seen as an allusion to the laxative properties of the rhubarb root. Chinese writings dating to 2700 BC mention rhubarb. Rhubarb is mentioned in the writings of Marco Polo and is known to have been planted in Italy in the 17th century. Those of you from Atlanta may be familiar with "Rhubarb" Jones, a country music DJ whose marches and celebrity golf tournaments have raised money for the Leukemia Society.

9. "We'll use ... this gross watery pumpion" -- Shakespeare's "Merry Wives of Windsor" The ultimate Indo-European root for pumpkin is "pek". "Pek" became "kek" in both Latin and Celtic usage. "Pek" means to cook or ripen, and this root has yielded linguistic fruit as divergent as "terra cotta" (cooked earth) and "precocious (ripened early)" Pumpkin is etymologically related to which of the following words for foods?

Answer: All of them

"Pumpkin" evolved from a Greek word meaning large ripe melon. The Latin roots of the word "biscuit", "bis" and "coctus" literally mean twice cooked. Although an intervening Arabic word is involved in its evolution, "apricot" derives ultimately from the same Greek word as precocious, a word that meant to ripen early. Ricotta comes from a Latin participle meaning to cook again.

In ""Merry Wives of Windsor", Miss Ford insulted Falstaff referring to him as "this unwholesome humidity, this gross watery pumpion". Shakespeare most likely did not have what we now refer to as a "pumpkin" in mind. The derivation of the word "pumpkin" proceeded independently of the discovery of the vegetable that the word "pumpkin" now designates. When English colonists were introduced to pumpkins in the New World, the colonists altered the already extant "pumpion" to pumpkin and applied it to the newly discovered vegetable.

10. When the Spanish became acquainted with avocadoes in the New World, they named the new vegetable using the already existing early Spanish word "avocado", presumably because of the word's similarity to the Aztec word for avocado, "ahuacatl". The early Spanish word "avocado" was also the name given to a practitioner of an oft-disparaged profession. "Ahuacatl" had a second meaning as well, a meaning thought to be based on the similarity of a part of the fruit with a feature of male anatomy. What was the second meaning of "ahuacatl" and the original meaning of the early Spanish "avocado", respectively?

Answer: Testicle and lawyer

Some would consider the information provided in the preceding question to be "popular etymology" and cast aspersions on "popular etymology" in much the same fashion that a few snobbish lovers of classical music might belittle "popular music". One critic of "popular etymology" felt compelled to point out that the Oxford English Dictionary "only tells us the word ahuacatl, not the meaning" as if to imply that any information omitted in the OED must, perforce, be inaccurate. (http://www.wischik.com/damon/Texts/popetym.html) This author assures us that, "The Oxford English Dictionary reserves its most withering scorn for the peddlers in popular etymology." (Incidentally, it should be "peddlers OF popular etymology" not "peddlers in popular etymology".)

To maintain that the 16th century Spaniards began using the word "avocado" because of the word's similarity to the Aztec word for the fruit "ahuacatl" is speculative. But to choose to ignore the similarity between the two words in the name of careful scholarship seems contrived. That the early Spanish "avocado" had two homonyms one applying to lawyers and the other to avocadoes seems well established, as does the fact that "ahuacatl" was an Aztec word denoting both avocadoes and testicles.

Source: Author uglybird

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Sink your teeth into this succulent assemblage of herbal verbiage as we burrow into the fertile soil of the linguistic origins of vegetable names. You will find that a few hints have been planted to assist you.

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