I love this time of year, when the first crates of the aptly named Citrus nobilis var. deliciosa arrive in the grocery stores. Yum. How did this easy-peel, seedless cross between a Mediterranean mandarin (tangerine) and a sweet orange come by its more common name: clementine?
We owe it to a French priest, Father Clément Rodier, who first cultivated the hybrid, accidentally, it seems, in 1902 near Oran, Algeria.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the heroine -- daughter of a "miner, forty-niner" -- of the famous ballad dating from the 1880s. Her name, a feminine form of the French Clément, was fairly popular in the US in the 19th century but slid progressively out of fashion in the 20th, finally disappearing off the charts in the fifties. Although her name is unambiguously pronounced to rhyme with "tine", the fruit can rhyme with "tine" or "teen". I myself say "teen", mostly because I first encountered the fruit in France, but, as a result, I have been roundly teased by other Canadians (for whom "tine" seems to be the overwhelming favourite) for being pretentious. What do you say? (That is, "How do you pronounce this?", not "Am I pretentious?")
Most of our clementines in Canada come from Morocco, and their older cousins the tangerines have a connection with the same country, for they are named after the Moroccan port of Tangier.
Both are subcategories of the mandarin orange, of Chinese origin, which is possibly so-called in reference to the rich yellow colour of the robes of the upper echelon bureaucrats in the imperial Chinese civil service.
Learn more fascinating word stories by taking my "Rollicking Story of the English Language" course: http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/p/history-of-english-language-courses.html
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