Vocabulary surprises

For some purposes, you can function fairly well with material in another language, so long as the topic stays within domains that are familiar to you — like linguistics, say. But when you wander into other domains, especially those that are closely tied to sociocultural conventions, things get messy, even if you stick to nouns; there’s just so much to know about cultural artifacts and customs, for example, and a huge vocabulary to acquire in these areas, in the names of animals and plants, etc.

I can deal pretty well with technical material in French, for example, but I’m easily stumped when it comes to artifacts, animals, plants, and the like. By way of illustration: my daughter gave me a big box of postcards on The Art of Instruction, with images of school materials from the 1950s, from mostly French but also some German sources. The German items have no text, but the French material (from Éditions Rossignol — the name is great; rossignol means ‘nightingale’) is heavy with text. For animals and plants, much of the vocabulary is technical teminology from zoology, anatomy, or botany, and that’s fascinating, but I can’t be expected to know these expressions. However, there are also the common names for animals and plants, and they contain many surprises.

That brings me to the tadpole.

Gamma linole(n)ic acid and borage

In Tuesday’s NYT Science Times, from “Really? The Claim: Evening Primrose Oil Soothes Eczema” by Anahad O’Connor:

It may not exactly be a household name, but evening primrose, a bright yellow plant native to North America, has a large following in the alternative medicine world.

The seeds of the plant contain essential fatty acids, which are used to make an oil that has a variety of uses as a dietary supplement and folk remedy. Its most popular use may be for eczema, the skin condition that affects as many as one in five people. Widely marketed and easy to find, primrose oil contains gamma linoleic acid, which is thought to help reduce skin inflammation without the side effects of other treatments.

digitalis / foxglove

Another showy plant of the season: digitalis, or foxglove, blooming now in several locations close to my house in Palo Alto:

Cultivars of the common foxglove, Digitalis purpurea. The etymology of the Latin name is straightforward, but the common name foxglove presents a puzzle.

Gay greens: the Big Two

In my Columbus OH household, the residents had a name for a particular category of foodstuffs, especially as salad ingredients: gay greens, taking in, for instance: arugula (or rocket), radicchio, watercress, mâche (or corn salad), fennel, (curly) endive, Belgian endive, flat (or Italian) parsley, and basil (especially the fancy varieties). (Sprouts of all kinds are hippie greens.) The association with queers comes primarily from these being fashionable foodstuffs, connected in many people’s minds with fancy cooking, adventurous dining, and foodie enthusiasm — activities that are also associated with gay men. Plus the widespread attitude that green salads are “unmanly” food: Real Men eat red meat, not green salads.

(The association of these foodstuffs with queers will no doubt come as a surprise to many Italian-Americans, not to mention actual Italians, who are accustomed to them as everyday ingredients.)

Today I’ll look at the Big Two of the gay greens, arugula and radicchio (noting that I am very fond of them both).

ranunculus

On the heels of my primrose posting, here’s one on another seasonal flower in these parts, the ranunculus (a flower especially of the late winter and early spring). Very pretty in an overblown sort of way, and with an odd etymology.

primroses

As we slide into summer in these parts, the winter-blooming flowers are coming to the end of their season; from this posting, about cyclamens:

Winter in northern California is brightened by a number of flowers that thrive in that season: English primroses, anemones, violas (including pansies), and snapdragons, for example. And cyclamens …

(And cymbidium orchids, discussed here.) Now, while they’re still blooming, some words on primroses (including an etymological essay on the name primrose, which has nothing to do with primness.)

tree nuts

In the NYT Science Times on 4/9/13: “Walnuts for Diabetes” by Nicholas Bakalar:

Eating walnuts may reduce the risk for Type 2 diabetes in women, a large new study concludes.

Previous studies have suggested an inverse relationship between tree nut consumption and diabetes. Though the findings are correlational, walnuts are uniquely high in omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, which may be of particular value in Type 2 diabetes prevention.

Tree nut turns out to be a culinary rather than botanical term, though its function is to distinguish (culinary) nuts that grow on trees — “true” (culinary) nuts — from peanuts, the fruits of which mature underground. This despite the fact that there’s a lot of allergy crossover between the two types, to the extent that many sites refer to “PN/TN allergies”, for ‘peanut/tree nut allergies’.

Bell pepper sex

Posted by Jadili Africa on Facebook, a report on sex differences in Bell peppers:

I never knew this! Flip the bell peppers over to check their gender. The ones with four bumps are female and those with three bumps are male. The female peppers are full of seeds, but sweeter and better for eating raw and the males are better for cooking.

With an illustration:

Though fascinating, the whole story looks preposterous.

Abutilon and its relatives

Caught sight of in a neighbor’s (walled) front garden: bits of a pretty vining abutilon, in bloom for a good part of the year. Much like this variety (Firefly):

  (#1)

And for several years, just around the corner (on the northwest corner of Emerson and Forest in Palo Alto) there used to be a big concrete planter with a sweet upright abutilon growing in it — until the shrub was vandalized to death, and then the planter as well, alas. The color of this one was much like the plant in (#1); here’s a gorgeous deep red variety (Nabob):

  (#2)

Coming up: discussion of abutilon and the mallow family to which it belongs. Marshmallows and gumbo will eventually appear.

Stone fruits, nuts, and berries

Posting about flowering pear trees reminded me of some complexities in the classification of fruits. Putting aside the well-known divergence between the use of the word fruit in botany and its use in cooking and dining contexts, I’ll look at some more specific cases, in particular stone fruit(s). Again, there’s a divergence between the technical terminology of botany and ordinary language — a result of botanists having taken over ordinary vocabulary and employed it as technical vocabulary in specialized senses.