The etymological secrets hidden in your soup

Image by Ian Wilson from Pixabay

Not only are vegetables good for you, they can be a source of delight: the fragrance and sweetness of tomatoes on a summer day, the delicious pop that gives snap peas their name, the contented murmuring a winter stew on the stove.

The words we use for vegetables are loaded with the history of how people have eaten throughout the centuries. Here are some of the etymologies of your favorite (or least favorite) greens.

Radish

The word ‘radish’ is a special word for word-lovers, because it simply means ‘root’! The root is the same one we see in ‘radical’.

Carrot

From ancient Greek καρωτόν (karoton), through Latin and French.

The Old English word for a carrot was more, which is cognate with the modern Welsh moron (no, those Welsh greengrocers aren’t insulting your intelligence!)

The Old English word is distantly related to the Russian word for carrot, морковь (morkov’).

Potato

This New World vegetable comes from the Taíno language, which was spoken in the majority of the Caribbean before the Spanish Conquest. The Taíno word was batata, which was adopted as the Spanish patata and eventually became the English potato.

The German word is Kartoffel is a corruption of the Italian tartufolo, which came for the word for truffle. This in turn came from the Latin terrae tuber, tuber of the earth.

Tomato

Borrowed from Spanish, from the Nahuatl-language word tomatl. Nahuatl was the language spoken in the Aztec empire, centered on modern-day Mexico.

Avocado

The Nahuatl word ahuacatl gave us the common Spanish word aguacate and the slightly altered form avocado which was borrowed into English.

In many parts of South America, this vegetable is called a palta, from a Quechua word.

Corn

This word simply meant, and is indeed cognate with the English word ‘grain’. Maize (borrowed from Taíno) was originally known as Indian corn.

Onion

In colloquial Latin, a string of onions (formally known as cepa) was known as an unio, a union (individual vegetables united on a single string). This was borrowed into Old French and English.

The more formal Latin word cepa became the root of Italian cipolla, Spanish cebolla, and German Zwiebel. It also is the root of the English word chive.

The Russian word is лук (luk) which is related to the English word leek through Proto-Germanic.

Shallot and scallion derive from the Latin ascalonia cepa — onion of Ashkelon.

Garlic

Garlic is a native English word composed of two elements: gar meaning spear or clove, and leek (see above).

The Romance language terms aglio (Italian), ajo (Spanish), ail (French) derives from the Latin alium, which may be related to the word for wings, referring to the cloves.

The German Knoblauch comes from the verb klieben (to cleave) and Lauch (leek); therefore, a cloven leek.

Mushroom

From Old French moisseron, probably derived from the word mosse (moss).

Zucchini

An Italian diminutive of zucca, meaning ‘squash’ — a little squash. Ultimately from the Latin cucurbita, meaning ‘gourd’.

Outside of US usage this vegetable is typically known as a courgette, a French diminutive of courge (derived from Latin cucurbita, which also gave us gourd) meaning a marrow squash.

Pumpkin

English speakers added the diminutive suffix -kin to the French pompon (melon) to refer to this squash. Ultimately derives from the Greek word πέπων (pepon, also melon) which in turn comes from the word for ‘to ripen’.

Squash

Unrelated to what you might do to a bug, as it is borrowed from the Narragansett language spoken by the Algonquin tribe in what is now Rhode Island. Their word was askutasquash, meaning ‘something that can be eaten raw’.

Eggplant

This disgusting vegetable has been given a disgusting name so that you can consider yourself fairly warned.

In the UK, it is known as an aubergine, which reached French through the Arabic اَلْبَاذِنْجَان‎ (al-badinjan). Ultimately from Sanskrit वातिगगम (vatigagama).

Lettuce

If you break open a lettuce stalk, you will find a milk-like liquid. This led to the Latin term lactuca, derived from the word for milk.

Cabbage

If you were speaking Old French, you would find the phrase ‘a head of cabbage’ reduntant, because caboche simply meant ‘head’ in the northern dialect, ultimately derived from the Latin caput.

In modern French, the word is chou, derived from the Latin caulis, meaning a stalk or the stem of a cabbage.

Cauliflower

From Latin caulis (see above) and English flower, together essentially meaning ‘cabbage-flower’.

Broccoli

In Latin, broccus meant buck-toothed, perhaps from a Gaulish word for badger. In Italian, brocco meant something that projected (like a buck tooth), and broccoli was a diminutive version of this word.

Asparagus

From Latin asparagus, from Greek ἀσφάραγος, which also meant ‘throat’.

It was known as sparrowgrass in English until the Victorian period through folk etymology.

In Old English, the word was eorþnafola, meaning earth-navel.

Artichoke

The Latin word for the artichoke was carduus, which also referred to the thistle (giving us the English word card as in ‘to card wool’, often done with thistles, and chard). The modern version of the plant, however, was introduced to Spain by the Moors as ‘الْخُرْشُوف’ (al-kursuf)‎’ where it spread across Europe. The word used in the northern Italian Lombard language was articiocco, which gave rise to the English word. They were introduced to England in the early 16th century.

Beet

From Latin beta, origin unknown.

The Russian word is свёкла (svyokla) which comes from the Greek word σεῦτλον meaning chard (see above).

Spinach

The Persian word اسپناخ (espanax) was borrowed into Arabic as إِسْفَانَاخ (isfanak), in turn borrowed by the French as espinoche, and finally found its way to us.

Celery

From ancient Greek σέλῑνον (selinon), simply meaning celery, borrowed through the French.

Native English words for this vegetable were march and smallage.

Cucumber

Ultimately from Latin cucumis (cucumber). This in turn comes from a much older root which has spread widely, but unfortunately cannot be traced to a specific source.

Pea

The Ancient Greeks knew the pea as πισον (pison), it became pisum in Latin and pise in Old English. Originally, pease was the singular form of the Modern English word, while peasen was the plural. However, the final ‘s’ sound led English speakers to believe that pease was the plural and drop the ‘s’ of the root to leave us with the new singular word ‘pea’. (A similar thing happened with the word ‘cherise’ meaning ‘cherry’).

Pepper

This may be the oldest traceable word on the list — ancient Greek had πέπερι (peperi). We don’t know where they inherited the pepper from directly, but Sanskrit has the very similar word पिप्पलि (pippali) to mean a pepper.

Earth's Most Nutritious Fruit

Chance, Choice, and the Avocado: The Strange Evolutionary and Creative History of Earth’s Most Nutritious Fruit

In the last week of April in 1685, in the middle of a raging naval war, the English explorer and naturalist William Dampier arrived on a small island in the Bay of Panama carpeted with claylike yellow soil. Dampier — the first person to circumnavigate the globe thrice, inspiring others as different as Cook and Darwin — made careful note of local tree species everywhere he traveled, but none fascinated him more than what he encountered for the first time on this tiny island.

Dampier described the black bark and smooth oval leaves of the tall “Avogato Pear-tree,” then paused at its unusual fruit — “as big as a large Lemon,” green until ripe and then “a little yellowish,” with green flesh “as soft as Butter” and no distinct flavor of its own, enveloping “a stone as big as a Horse-Plumb.” He described how the fruit are eaten — two or three days after picking, with the rind peeled — and their most common local preparation: with a pinch of salt and a roasted plantain, so that “a Man that’s hungry, may make a good meal of it”; there was also uncommonly delectable sweet variation: “mixt with Sugar and Lime-juice, and beaten together in a Plate.” And then he added:

It is reported that this Fruit provokes to Lust, and therefore is said to be much esteemed by the Spaniards.

Avocado by Étienne Denisse from the stunningly illustrated 19th-century French encyclopedia Flore d’Amérique. (Available as a print, a cutting board, and stationery cards, benefitting the New York Botanical Garden.)

But far more fascinating than the cultural lore of the avocado are its own amorous propensities, uncovered in the centuries since by sciences that would have then seemed like magic, or heresy.

The most nutritious known fruit, the avocado — a mostly evergreen member of the laurel family — is a ghost of evolution that should have grown extinct when the animals that fed on it and disseminated its enormous seeds did. Mercifully, it did not. Ample in Europe and North American during the Ice Age, it somehow managed to survive in Mexico and spread from there. But even more impressively, it managed to survive its own self-defeating sexual relations — the botanical equivalent of the human wire-crossing Eric Berne described in his revelatory 1964 classic Games People Play.

Bald of petals though the tree’s small greenish blossoms may be, they are an example of “perfect flowers” — the botanical term for bisexual blooming plants, which can typically self-pollinate. The avocado, however, is far from reproductively self-sufficient due to an astonishing internal clock, which comes in two mirror-image varieties.

In some cultivars — like the Hass, Pinkerton, and Reed avocados — the blossoms open up into reproductive receptivity in their female guise each morning, then close by that afternoon; the following afternoon, they open in their male guise. Other cultivars — the Fuerte, Zutano, and Bacon avocado among them — bloom on the opposite schedule: female in the afternoon, male by morning.

Thisbe by John William Waterhouse, 1909. (Available as a print.)

This presents a Pyramus and Thisbe problem across the wall of time — while both partners inhabit the space of a single tree, they can’t reach each other across the day-parts and need to be pollinated by trees on the opposite schedule. Their reproduction is further derailed by the fact that some varieties, like the Hass, only fertilize to fruition every other year.

Ever since humans have cultivated Earth’s most nutritious fruit, they have tried to help the helpless romancer with various intervention strategies — grafting, planting trees with opposite blooming schedules near each other, even manually pollinating blossoms of the same tree.

The world’s most beloved avocado — the Hass — is the consequence of human interference consecrated by happenstance in the hands of a California mailman in the 1920s.

The Hass avocado in Northern California. (Photograph: Maria Popova.)

The year he turned thirty, Rudolph Hass (June 5, 1892–October 24, 1952) was leafing through a magazine when an illustration stopped him up short: a tree growing dollar bills instead of fruit. He was making 25 cents an hour delivering mail while raising a growing family. The tree, he learned, was an avocado and its fruit were promised to be the next great horticultural boon.

Rudolph took all the money he had, borrowed some from his sister Ida, and bought a small grove of the leading commercial avocado variety — the Fuerte — with a few other cultivars sprinkled in. Needing the greatest possible gain from his grove, he wanted only Fuertes but couldn’t afford to buy any new trees. Instead, he decided to cut down some of the old ones and graft them to become more fertile young Fuertes. He took counsel from a professional grafter, who said the best technique was to graft with his own seedlings. He had none. But it happened that a man on his mail route had a mighty green thumb and was experimenting with growing avocados from seeds, which he got from restaurant refuse.

Rudolph bought three of the lustrous dark orbs and planted them in his grove. They sprouted. When they grew strong enough, he grafted onto one of them a cutting from one of the mature Fuerte trees. The graft didn’t take. He tried again on another of the seedlings. This too failed.

Resigned, Rudolph abandoned the experiment and let his surviving seedling grow as it pleased. In a neglected corner of the grove, it quietly went on doing what trees, those masters of improvisation, do — press on with their blind optimism. When it reached maturity, it began bearing fruit that looked nothing like any other avocado — dark and luscious, the Braille of its skin glimmering with violet.

When Rudolph cut one open for his five young children, they declared those were the most delicious avocados they had ever tasted.

Soon, the world would agree.

This being America and that being the wake of the Great Depression, the Hass family had patented the avocado within a decade.

Rudolph and Elizabeth Hass in front of the mother tree

After describing his “new and improved variety of avocado which has certain characteristics that are highly desirable” and listing all the ways in which “the present invention” differed from existing avocados — higher oil content, superior flavor, doesn’t drop from the tree or rot inside before ripening, resists cold blasts, and, oh, it is almost purple — Rudolph ended his patent application with a summation of his creation that hums with a kind of humble pride:

I claim as my invention: The variety of avocado tree… characterized by its summer ripening, medium-sized fruits, of purple color having a leathery skin… and borne on long stemps [sic], with a small tight seed and with creamy flesh of excellent color and nutty flavor, smooth with no fibre and butter-like consistency.

Rudolph Hass’s avocado patent, 1935.

In the near-century since Rudolph’s hopeful and hapless experiment, the Hass avocado has begun bringing in more than a billion dollars a year for growers, accounting for four fifths of the American avocado industry. But Rudolph Hass continued working as a mailman until he was felled by a heart attack months after his sixtieth birthday, months before Rachel Carson indicted her country with the reminder that “the real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth — soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife.”

Today, every single Hass avocado in every neighborhood market that ever was and ever will be can be traced to a single mother tree grown by a destitute California mailman in 1926 — tender evidence that every tree is in some sense immortal, and a living testament to how chance and choice converge to shape our lives.

The Notre-Dame Fire: Unbelievable Truth

The unbelievable truth behind the Notre-Dame fire

Chris Harvey - Yesterday 01:00

In the early evening of Monday, April 15 2019, as a Mass to celebrate Holy Week was being held at Notre-Dame in Paris, a fire alarm went off in the cathedral’s security control room. It was 6.17pm. The fire security officer, working a double shift on his first day on the job, read the panel and radioed to alert one of the guards. He went to investigate what he understood to be a fire in the attic of the sacristy, and found nothing. An evacuation announcement was brushed off as a false alarm, and worshippers were invited back into the building.
Notre-Dame fire Paris - Stephane Gautier Alamy Stock Photo
© Stephane Gautier / Alamy Stock PhotoNotre-Dame fire Paris - Stephane Gautier / Alamy Stock Photo

Yet fire had taken hold – not in the sacristy, but in the attic of the nave, an area known as the “forest”, where a lattice of 900-year-old oak beams held up the roof. After a crucial half-hour delay, by which time smoke was being photographed billowing above the cathedral by tourists outside, the seat of the fire was discovered. 

With no sprinkler system, nor fire walls to slow the spread, it was soon burning out of control. President Emmanuel Macron arrived in time to see the 19th-century spire collapse and crash through the vault of the nave. As the world watched on, the flames spread to the belfries, and the complete destruction of one of the most visited buildings in Europe seemed inevitable. 

Miraculously, thanks to a small group of firefighters who volunteered to go back towards the intense heat – temperatures peaked above 1,200C – Notre-Dame was saved, and no lives were lost.

Now, with his new film Notre-Dame on Fire, director Jean-Jacques Annaud (The Name of the Rose) has turned these real-life events into one of the most compelling dramas of the year. Approached with the idea of making a documentary, the 78-year-old Oscar winner, whose other films include Enemy at the Gates and Seven Years in Tibet, saw the dramatic potential of recreating the fire when he began researching precisely what had happened. 

“I read the early articles,” he tells me. “I had the feeling that I was dealing with talented journalists who were inventing elements similar to very good screenplay writers in Hollywood. Frankly, I said to myself, this cannot be true. This is invented. It’s impossible.”

Annaud set about contacting those who were involved on that fateful evening – conducting more than 150 interviews – “and what they revealed to me was far more bizarre, more incredible, or should I say, not credible – yet it was the truth.” 

The steeple and spire collapses as smoke and flames engulf the Notre-Dame Cathedral - GEOFFROY VAN DER HASSELTAFP via Getty Images
© Provided by The TelegraphThe steeple and spire collapses as smoke and flames engulf the Notre-Dame Cathedral - GEOFFROY VAN DER HASSELT/AFP via Getty Images

In fact, so many new details came out, he says, that “I was asked to see the justice department, which I refused because I am a film-maker and I don’t belong to the police department. But I’ve learnt so many things, even after finishing the movie... people will tell a film-maker things that they wouldn’t trust to the justice department.”

These included documents from a French chemist at Shanghai University, which showed that the timbers had been sprayed a year earlier with an anti-fungal gel – Xilix Gel Fongi+ – that made them more flammable. “Neighbours from the very narrow streets close to the cathedral had remembered the smell of it being applied … it was on all of the carpentry. 

“I learnt from the factory that the spray comes with a warning: ‘In case of fire, never use water.’ Because water on that product will intensify the size of the flames. I said it to the firemen. I had the impression that they had no idea … that they were not informed.

“There were so many mistakes, so many malfunctioning elements. Everything that could go wrong, went wrong.”

Traffic in Paris came to a standstill as fire crews tried to get to the scene. Once on the Île de la Cité, in the middle of the Seine, where Notre-Dame stands, firefighters had to deal with inadequate water pressure, punctured hoses, and spiral staircases so tight that they had to climb over one another to pass. 

Meanwhile, the man with the key required to rescue one of the most sacred relics in all of Christendom, the Crown of Thorns, purchased by Louis IX in 1238 for 13,134 gold pieces, was at a soirée in Versailles, and had taken said key with him.

Louis had almost bankrupted France to secure the crown from Venetian merchants. “It put France in terrible debt for 35 years, because it cost the budget of the kingdom for one year,” says Annaud. “Today it would be like £2 trillion.” As for the crown’s authenticity, “I could not interview any witness of the Crucifixion,” he says, “but what I can tell you is there are mentions of this crown dating back to the second century, when we know that it was kept in Jerusalem.” 

Yet what shocked Annaud was that the relic initially rescued from its display case at Notre-Dame was merely a replica of the one that had been brought from Constantinople. “I couldn’t believe the fact that for 30 years, people came from the other end of the world to kneel and pray in front of that fake which, when we recreated it, cost us two euros to make, with some wire and one of those [gold] sprays that you buy for Christmas. It was mind-blowing.”

The real crown was in a safe, which needed general manager Laurent Prades, who was racing to get back from Versailles, to turn the key according to a code. That was if he could get through police lines (he was turned back) and remember the code (he couldn’t). He had to break through and run, then phone another code holder beside the safe itself, with what he described as “incandescent pieces of wood” falling around him – “the nave littered with burnt beams … the vaults pierced”. Annaud takes this ticking-clock disaster-movie material and cranks up the tension everywhere you look. He also deals head-on with one of the most controversial elements of the battle to save Notre-Dame.

It had become clear that only an effort to quell the fire in the belfries could save the cathedral, which dates from 1163 and had survived the French Revolution and the Nazis. Most were convinced it would collapse. Fire chiefs were unwilling to risk the lives of firemen and women in what seemed like a suicide mission, but when volunteers came forward, it appears that the officer in charge asked Macron to take responsibility for it to go ahead. 

“This is the way it has been told to me,” Annaud says. “I have the original footage, with the [fire brigade] generals and with Macron, with the prime minister, with the préfet of police.” He uses the real footage to restage the moment. “It ends the way I did it. It was not the same editing as on French television, where you had the impression that Macron said yes. He never did that.” 

He did, however, give a wink. “The image you see of Macron putting his hand on the shoulder of the general, blinking his [right] eye, is exactly what happened … And it was known among the firemen … But I must insist on one thing – a president of the republic is chief of the military, but is not the person that should make decisions on the battlefield. But basically, he didn’t say no, this is what we can say.” His silence was taken as consent. The volunteers put out the fire. 

Emmanuel Macron arriving at the front entrance of the Notre-Dame - PHILIPPE WOJAZERAFPGetty Images
© Provided by The TelegraphEmmanuel Macron arriving at the front entrance of the Notre-Dame - PHILIPPE WOJAZER/AFP/Getty Images

Fire brigade adjutant Rémi Lemaire, whose plan it was, had been ordered to evacuate the south tower, but had been determined  to “get a visual” of the fire. He then suggested “getting the water up to the Chimera Gallery. We were some 20 men to embark on the operation and, indeed, I can say it was no small feat!” There was no escape route if it went wrong. 

Annaud was committed to sticking to the facts. The film begins with a dedication from 18th-century epigrammatist Antoine Rivaroli: “Everything is true, as implausible as it seems.” But the director did allow himself a depiction of the fire’s possible causes: a burning cigarette-butt dropped by one of the workers working on scaffolding on the cathedral, who would have clocked off at 6pm (“the police know exactly who smoked, because they retrieved the cigarettes and analysed the DNA of dozens of people … although it’s absolutely forbidden”); a pigeon pecking an electrical cable; reported threats against Notre-Dame made by jihadists. But he does not attempt to draw a definitive conclusion. Also, with limited opportunities to shoot on location, we see the cathedrals of Sens, Bourges and Amiens, as well as a huge studio-built set, standing in for Notre-Dame itself. 

For Annaud, who studied medieval art and history, making the film tapped into a lifelong passion. Though an atheist from a secular family, he tells me, “as an 11-year-old, I wanted to do a catalogue of the not-known cathedrals of France, and I started it, I have thousands of pictures that I took in that period”. Notre-Dame, he notes, “still has this perfume of the Middle Ages”. He lives nearby, at Pont Neuf. 

Yet he admits he was not an admirer of the 19th-century additions made by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, in the neo-Gothic style. “What he did is a Romantic rebuild of the cathedral. It’s a distorted vision of early Gothic art, more of a Victorian look. But my belief is that the spire was way too heavy for the transept crossing, it was very dangerous.”

Crowds watched in shock as the iconic building burns - Stephane Gautier
© Provided by The TelegraphCrowds watched in shock as the iconic building burns - Stephane Gautier

One of the unexpected results of the fire, he says, was that the cathedral, which was struggling to fund much-needed restoration at the time, has “enough money now to restore the cathedral and make it strong enough for the next 1,000 years”. (It received £865 million in donations.) Yet 100 cultural figures have spoken out against a proposed revamp of the interior involving mood lighting and modern art, which has been approved by French authorities. Macron’s plan for a contemporary design to replace the spire, meanwhile, has been abandoned after an outcry. Fortunately, Notre-Dame’s famous rose window made it through the blaze.   

What was the one thing Annaud was most glad to have seen survive the flames? “Hope,” he says. He compares the burning of Notre-Dame with the destruction of the Twin Towers. “It was far beyond a monument that was on fire,” he notes. “Here we have something sacred… It’s a symbol of not only faith, but of Western civilisation … It’s beyond Europe.”

Notre-Dame on Fire is in cinemas from today