One funky plant

We who have gardens that are plunged in shade are ever grateful to the trusty hosta family. But did you know they have not always been called hostas?

Indeed, this plant used to go by the name funkia. I feel it is a pity that this cute word lost out, because I would like to be able to talk about my funkias.

Although the plant is originally from Asia, neither word is of Asian origin. Both are derived from the names of European scientists: "funkia" from H. C. Funck (1771–1839), a Bavarian pharmacist and botanist, and "hosta" from N. T. Host (1761–1834), an Austrian physician and botanist.

I have only ever heard "hosta" pronounced "HOSS ta", but American dictionaries tell me that in the US "HOE sta" is more common. How do you pronounce it?

Another name for the hosta is "plantain lily", because of its similarity to these plantains, which also grow in my garden but make me less happy than my hostas:
 


You would think a plantain is called this because, well, it's a plant. But the origin is a quite different "plant": Latin planta (sole of the) foot. Plantains, as you can see, have broad, flat, prostrate leaves looking not unlike a foot. Well, if you use your imagination.

Another pronunciation surprise awaited me when I looked up "plantain" and discovered that I should not be calling it a "plan TANE" as I have always thought, but a "PLAN t'n". The same holds true for the other "plantain", a starchy type of unsweet banana.

fried plantains

Looking at the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, I see that I wasn't allowing any of this "PLAN t'n" nonsense in it, no matter what all the other dictionaries say. To be so bold, we must have done a survey of Canadians about their pronunciation of this word. How do you pronounce it? (Please don't tell me I was wrong!)


For more gardening-related posts, please click here: 
http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2016/06/gardening-related-wordlady-posts.html


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The birth of the word "fashionista"

I remember seeing evidence of "fashionista" when we were editing the letter F of the first edition of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, in about 1995, but not enough for it to make the cut for the dictionary. But by 2002 when we were editing the 2nd edition, there was plenty of evidence, so in it went. In fact, I often use this particular word as an example of how words make it into dictionaries. 
Here's the story of how the word came to  be (thanks to Word Spy for the link). 
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/04/i-apologize-for-inventing-the-word-fashionista-20-years-ago/275048/

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Cotoneaster

Following my post accumulating all my gardening words, a Wordlady reader has written to inquire about COTONEASTER, a quite popular shrub. She became acquainted with the written word before hearing it spoken (a problem shared with the people in this post), and so thought it was pronounced "Cotton Easter". I must admit I shared that misapprehension with her for a long time. (Be honest, now, how did you hear the title of this blog post in your head when you saw it?)  

In fact it is "kuh tony ASS ter".

Its name comes from modern botanical Latin cotonea (quince) + the suffix  -aster, essentially the Latin equivalent of  "-ish". So a cotoneaster is a plant that is "quince-ish", kinda like a quince:




The flower called an "aster" tout court gets its name from another word, the Latin and Greek word for "star", aster. As you can see in this photo, it is an appropriate name. 



Fortunately, botanists have resisted the urge to name an aster-ish flower an "asteraster".

The story of how we got to "quince" is also quite fascinating. The Romans had originally called the fruit a mālum Cydōnium, from mālum (apple) + Cydōnea (the name of the town in Crete now known as Khania). This became classical Latin cotoneum.
 
As we have seen before (peach), Latin words got squished into something shorter by the French, who usually dropped the ending and the middle consonant. So cotoneum became coin in Old French (a different coin than the one meaning "corner"). In modern French this is spelled coing, just so we English don't have a monopoly on ridiculous silent letters in spelling. 

Like many French food words, coin (also spelled quoyne or quyne) was borrowed into Middle English. So why don't we call the fruit  a "quin"? Very early on, the plural "coins/quynes" (also spelled "quince") was taken to be the singular. Naturally, we then had to create a new plural, to wit "quinces".

For another surprising word history involving quinces (and cats), click here:
http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2013/06/cat-word-of-month-marmalade.html

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Fancy  a trip to a beautiful Quebecois village to see some great dance? Check out my August trip to the Festival des Arts de Saint-Sauveur: 
http://toursenlair.blogspot.ca/2016/06/ballet-trip-to-saint-sauveur-now-booking.html 
 

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Canadian hypercorrection

God forbid we should use -or spellings like those Americans. 

more on this phenomenon: http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/.../stupor-or-stupour...

and http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/.../discouver... 

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Gorillas and guerrillas

Gorilla. Do not confuse with guerrilla.

There's been much in the news about gorillas lately, so of course you want to know why they are called that.  This is what the Oxford English Dictionary has to say:

An alleged African name for a wild or hairy man (strictly for the female only), preserved (in accusative plural γορίλλας) in the Greek account of the voyage undertaken by the Carthaginian Hanno in the 5th or 6th cent. BC; hence adopted in 1847 as the specific name of the ape Troglodytes gorilla (now Gorilla gorilla), first described by Dr. T. S. Savage, an American missionary in Western Africa.

Do not confuse gorillas with guerrillas. 

guerrilla /ɡəˈrɪlə/ 

▶

noun

(also guerilla)

• 1. a person taking part in an irregular war waged by small bands operating independently, often against a stronger, more organized force, with surprise attacks etc.: [also attributive] : guerrilla warfare.

 You will notice that the alternate spelling "guerilla" is given by dictionaries, but this spelling (which is also the spelling used in French) is MUCH less common than "guerrilla". 

The word comes from Spanish guerrilla, a diminutive of guerra (war), and was first used to describe Spanish fighters in the Peninsular War against Napoleonic occupation in the early 1800s.

Since then, this word has taken on a life of its own, and has since the 1970s become an adjective

"Designating activities conducted in an irregular, unorthodox, and spontaneous way, without regard to established conventions, rules, and formalities, as guerrilla advertising, guerrilla cooking, guerrilla filmmaking, etc."

Surprisingly, though, the first example of this adjectival usage is earlier than you would think:

1888   Polyclinic Nov. 134/2   The so-called pure pepsins..which, by a system of ‘guerrilla’ advertising..have been foisted upon the deceived medical profession.

 My favourite examples of this are:

guerrilla gardening  n. gardening on sites that the gardeners are not authorized to use (typically land which has been abandoned or otherwise neglected), esp. as a political or environmental statement.

guerrilla knitting  n. street art consisting of colourful knitted or crocheted items and motifs attached to public objects and monuments; the action of decorating objects or monuments in this way; cf. yarn bombing

"Who yarn-bombed that tree? Not moi!" *whistles nonchalantly*

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Upcoming Tea and Wordlady Events

Canada's Word Lady

presents

 Two Tea and Wordlady Events!


Tuesday June 28 at 230 pm

 Celebrate Canada Day!

Bachelor for Rent:

Things You Never Suspected About 

Canadian English 

A hilarious look at what is distinctive about 

Canadians and their language
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Tuesday July 12 at 230 pm

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Alive and Well and Living in English

 

An entertaining illustrated talk about how

Hebrew and Yiddish words have enriched English

and continue to do so.

SIGNUP DEADLINE JULY 5

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In the pink

In the past few weeks, I've been revelling in the profusion of pinks in my garden. You may be thinking that these mini- carnations are called this because they are pink in colour (well, except for the white ones...) but in fact the colour is named for the flower rather than vice versa, and the story is quite complicated.

The Anglo-Saxons didn't have a word for pink, and probably didn't even conceive of it as a separate colour, just as a lighter shade of red. They could use rosen (of the colour of a rose) on occasion, but this did not seem to designate a specific pale red colour.

Under the influence of French, by the 14th century "rose" was being used for what we would now call pink, as is the case in most European languages (although roses can be red or yellow or white, as well as pink!) But roses got  quite a lot of bad publicity in late 15th-century England, beset from 1455 to 1487 by a  power struggle between the House of Lancaster and the House of York. The first Tudor king, Henry VII, who seized power at the end of the period, used the Lancastrians' emblem of a red rose and the Yorks' white rose in his propaganda emphasizing how strife-ridden and unstable the 30 years preceding his beneficent orderly reign  had been. 

Whether or not this bad rap for roses set the stage for a new word for the colour is hard to say, but about 100 years later, English speakers looked to another flower to name this colour, and "pink" started its ascendancy over "rose", in spite of the fact that another word "pink" was used at the time for a greenish-yellow pigment (just to be really confusing!)

Pinks had been around for a few centuries under the name "gillyflower", a corruption of the French word girofle (clove, because of their clove-like scent). In the 1500s, people started to call them "pinks" because of their fringed petals, which look as if someone has taken the pinking shears to them.

This verb "pink" (make decorative cuts in fabric) had been around for a few centuries, possibly dating back to Old English in the form "ping", which is derived from the Latin pungere (prick, puncture).

So, a long and circuitous route from a Latin word meaning "pierce" to our everyday word for a pale red.
And a warning: if you read about the "pink" jackets traditionally worn by the British while fox hunting, remember they're not pink at all but scarlet. They may have been originally made by a tailor called Thomas Pink, though this has not been proved. Perhaps it's a case like slang, where the in-group knows the meaning of the word and outsiders are revealed by their ignorance.

For more gardening-related posts, please click here: 
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A mistake you really don't want to make

A perennial border. I will not be showing you a picture of the other word.

Today I was reading a post about gardens where the writer was talking about her "perineal" plants. 

Here's the definition of "perineal":

 of or pertaining to the region of the body between the anus and the scrotum or vulva

 What she meant, of course, was "perennial". 

For a compendium of gardening-related Wordlady posts, click here:
http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2016/06/gardening-related-wordlady-posts.html

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Gardening-related Wordlady posts

Since it's the season for gardening, I'm collecting together here links to all Wordlady's gardening-related posts:

1. LILAC Pronunciation and origin: http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2015/06/lack-lock-or-luck.html
2. TROWEL, SPADE, SHOVEL origin (and why do we say "Call a spade a spade"?): http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2016/05/calling-spade-spade-or-should-that-be.html
   
3. LAWN origin: http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2011/05/lawn.html
4. PEONY origin: http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2012/06/paeans-for-peonies.html
5. COSMOS  origin and pronunciation: http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2015/07/all-is-well-in-my-cosmos.html
6. WHEELBARROW OR WHEELBARREL? http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2013/08/wheelbarrow-or-wheelbarrel.html
7. TULIP origin: http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2013/04/tiptoe-through-tulips.html 
8. FUCHSIA pronunciation: http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2011/12/seasonal-spelling-slip-up.html 
9. PINK origin (which came first, the colour or the flower?): http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2016/06/in-pink.html
10. When FLOWER and FLOUR were the same word: http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2012/05/flower-and-flour.html
11. BASIL origin and pronunciation: http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2013/06/of-basil-and-basilisks.html
12. RUDBECKIA spelling and origin: http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2010/10/not-to-be-confused-with-politebeckia.html 
13. PASSIONFRUIT origin: http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2012/02/passion-fruit-or-passion-killers.html
14. PISTIL spelling and origin: http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2010/08/always-good-advice.html  
15. RHUBARB origin: http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2012/05/rhubarb.html
16. HERB or ERB? http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2012/10/herb-or-erb.html
17. SQUIRREL origin: http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2012/10/feeling-squirrelly.html  
18. HOSTA and PLANTAIN origin and pronunciation: http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2016/06/one-funky-plant.html
19. COTONEASTER and ASTER origin and pronunciation: http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2016/06/cotoneaster.html 
20. EUONYMUS origin and spelling: http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2011/04/are-you-pseudisodomous.html
21. SPRUCE origin: http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2016/10/sprucing-up-place.html 
22. CAMELLIA spelling, origin, and pronunciation: http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2016/10/the-wordlady-of-camellias.html 
23. MALVA / MALLOW origin: http://katherinebarber.blogspot.com/2018/08/more-about-mauve.html 
24. SERVICEBERRY /SASKATOON https://katherinebarber.blogspot.com/2019/05/at-your-service.html 

 
Is there a gardening-related word you would like to know more about? Send me an email at wordlady.barber@gmail.com.

Don't forget! Sign up for Wordlady Online starting with Hebrew and Yiddish Words in English. More information here:  https://katherinebarber.blogspot.com/2020/04/hebrew-and-yiddish-words-in-english.html

P.S. If you find the English language fascinating, you might enjoy regular updates about English usage and word origins from Wordlady. Receive every new post delivered right to your inbox! SUBSCRIPTION IS FREE! You can either:

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