If you are planning on serving your sweetheart passion fruit this coming Valentine's Day as being particularly appropriate, you might want to think again. When the word “passion” first came into English from a Latin word meaning “suffering”, it was used in particular for the sufferings of Jesus (as it indeed still is). Only later did the sense of “affliction” morph into “extreme love”, which can, alas, be an affliction. But the original meaning survives in the passion fruit. It is the fruit of the passion flower, which was called that because its parts, people thought, recalled Christ's crucifixion: the blossoms look like the crown of thorns, the styles like nails, and the leaves and tendrils like scourges.
Kind of cuts your appetite, doesn't it? Chocolate is safer! (And for more on that, visit this post.)
Kind of cuts your appetite, doesn't it? Chocolate is safer! (And for more on that, visit this post.)
How utterly appropriate! The number of people I have encountered who serve up that "mess" of what looks like a frog's C-section NOW know why the name is not congruous with the edibility of the fruit.....thank you WORD-LADY Michael G. Blackmore
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