In Middle English, asperages sometimes was regarded as a plural, with false singular aspergy. An old etymology tried to associate wormwood with warmth, on account of the warmth this plant produces in the stomach. Wormwood is widely used in medicine. 1 An alteration in the form of a word through the influence of a more familiar word or words that people associate with it, as in sparrow-grass for asparagus. Oxford University Press'sAcademic Insights for the Thinking World. Snyder, Harry. [citation needed] White asparagus is the result of applying a blanching technique while the asparagus shoots are growing. witch hazel: The first word in the name of the tree derives from the Old English word wice, meaning pliable; the use of witch hazel twigs as divining rods may have prompted the alteration of the name. For example, vituperate goes back to Latin vitium blemish and parare to prepare. But the existence of a blend, unless the blending has occurred before our eyes (as in Brexit, blog, or smog), is hard to prove. There are three main types of asparagus which all come from the same plant: there are the common all-green tender spears that have very good flavour, and then there is white asparagus, made by forcing the spears to grow in the absence of light by earthing up around and over tips. This instability shows that the origin of the word was even then not clear to the speakers and that the root mass may have been associated with the noun mass long ago. In the second century AD, the Greek physician Galen, highly respected within Roman society, mentioned asparagus as a beneficial herb, but as dominance of the Roman empire waned, asparagus' medicinal value drew little attention[72][Note 1] Filed under Britain, cooking, food, General, history, Recipes, Uncategorized, Tagged as asparagus, etymology, history, recipe, seasonal food, spring, vegetables. The 'leaves' are in fact needle-like cladodes (modified stems) in the axils of scale leaves; they are .mw-parser-output .frac{white-space:nowrap}.mw-parser-output .frac .num,.mw-parser-output .frac .den{font-size:80%;line-height:0;vertical-align:super}.mw-parser-output .frac .den{vertical-align:sub}.mw-parser-output .sr-only{border:0;clip:rect(0,0,0,0);height:1px;margin:-1px;overflow:hidden;padding:0;position:absolute;width:1px}632 millimetres (141+14 inches) long and 1mm (132in) broad, and clustered four to 15 together, in a rose-like shape. pumpkin: The name of the gourd was derived from the Greek word pepon, meaning melon; the second syllable of the Middle English descendant pompone (also spelled pumpion) was altered to the diminutive syllable -kin. It is for this reason I only buy British asparagus. Traditionally it is cooked in a tall asparagus pan so that the spears can be boiled upright. [9] The root system, often referred to as a 'crown', is adventitious and the root type is fasciculated. The word massacre surfaced in English in the sixteenth century and is a borrowing from Old French, but its origin in that language has not been found. [62], Debate exists about the universality of producing the sulfurous smell, as well as the ability to detect it. The shoots are prepared and served in a number of ways around the world, typically as an appetizer[36] or vegetable side dish. Certain compounds in asparagus are metabolized to yield ammonia and various sulfur-containing degradation products, including various thiols and thioesters,[14] which following consumption give urine a characteristic smell. See also back formation, metanalysis. D. Harper. Water makes up 93% of asparagus's composition. Asparagus has been eaten in Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome and has been loved in France for many centuries, and it is the carefully cultivated and selected French type of asparagus that made its way to Britain in the seventeenth century, a time of great vegetable improvement, and it is still grown here today. Some natural phenomenon is called rain or snow, and, if you dont know what those words mean, you will never guess. [35] The amino acid asparagine gets its name from asparagus, as the asparagus plant is relatively rich in this compound. in the Old English roots are incompatible. mistletoe: Mistel, of uncertain origin, was the name of this shrub that grows on trees and is associated with Christmas (originally, with fertility, hence the custom of kissing under a sprig of the plant around the time of the holiday); in Old English, it was called misteltn (mistel twig), and the fading emphasis on the final syllable resulted in the current spelling. The Israeli study found that from their 307 subjects, all of those who could smell "asparagus urine" could detect it in the urine of anyone who had eaten asparagus, even if the person who produced it could not detect it.

[51] Tall, narrow asparagus cooking pots allow the shoots to be steamed gently, their tips staying out of the water. burger: This word is a shortening of hamburger, which originally was styled as Hamburger to denote a resident of Hamburg, Germany, or various things originating there. mood, which in the Old English period meant mind, thought. Thus, keep-mind, thought-preserver, from a belief in its medicinal virtue? )that is, if you are not teetotal and have a taste for fortified wines. Asparagus officinalis. Related: Asparaginous. Asparagus needs little cooking: just a few minutes steaming is required. Some[15] of the volatile organic compounds responsible for the smell are:[16][17], Subjectively, the first two are the most pungent, while the last two (sulfur-oxidized) give a sweet aroma. plant whose succulent young shoots are cooked and eaten as a vegetable, edible young shoots of the asparagus plant. While this SNP did not explain all of the difference in detection between people, it provides support for the theory that genetic differences occur in olfactory receptors that lead people to be unable to smell these odorous compounds. [42], China is by far the world's largest producer: in 2017 it produced 7,845,162 tonnes, followed by Peru with 383,098 tonnes and Mexico with 245,681 tonnes. Green asparagus is eaten worldwide, and the availability of imports throughout the year has made it less of a delicacy than it once was.

Cover so that the asparagus part-boils and part-steams. Asparagus was corrupted in some places to "sparrow grass"; indeed, John Walker wrote in 1791 that "Sparrowgrass is so general that asparagus has an air of stiffness and pedantry". You'll also get three bonus ebooks completely free. Cantonese restaurants in the United States often serve asparagus stir-fried with chicken, shrimp, or beef. This plant name goes back to Old English, where it sounded wermd and had very similar cognates elsewhere in West Germanic. I didnt know anything about drake being a version of dragon, but that makes sense, too. Plants bearing seeds produce spears that are smaller and thinner, and plants without seeds produce larger and thicker spears. The English word "asparagus" derives from classical Latin but the plant was once known in English as sperage, from the Medieval Latin sparagus. By 16c.

werian to protect, defend (compare German wehren, familiar to many from Wehr-macht the defense branch of the Third Reich). Asparagus spears of a middling thickness will take no longer than four minutes, and will most likely be done in three. You can trim the ends of course if you want to be fancy. Asparagus, or garden asparagus, folk name sparrow grass, scientific name Asparagus officinalis, is a perennial flowering plant species in the genus Asparagus. I do not know whether wormwood warms the stomach or perhaps even the cockles of ones heart, but the vowels u ~ a (again vowels!) Helmut Zipner, who peeled a ton of asparagus in 16 hours, holds the world record in asparagus peeling. https://www.etymonline.com/word/asparagus (accessed $(datetime)). After cheeseburger was coined, hamburger was often shortened to burger. Many German cities hold an annual Spargelfest (asparagus festival) celebrating the harvest of white asparagus. In Old French, the word had several variants: massacre, maacre, macecre, and macecle. According to an ingenious hypothesis, massacre is a blend of (am)mazzare to slaughter, kill (compare Engl. Since the stuff is a narcotic, we can visualize it as biting the human being. In the 1980s, three studies from France,[63] China, and Israel published results showing that producing odorous urine from asparagus was a common human characteristic. Decades ago (during the 1960s), I was an avid reader of a comic strip that came in a weekly newspaper. Asparagus is a herbaceous, perennial plant[8] growing to 100150 centimetres (4060 inches) tall, with stout stems with much-branched, feathery foliage. sparrowgrass: Asparagus, borrowed directly from the Latin version of asparagos, the Greek word for an edible plant, was altered by folk etymology to sparrowgrass. Only folk etymology has no problems with massacre: of course, it means mass killing. No, it does not. Peeled asparagus will poach much faster. Its source is Latin mactare to sacrifice a victim; destroy. (Those familiar with German will recognize Metzger butcher, now a northern word, but formerly current in the south.) Greeks and Romans ate it fresh when in season, and dried the vegetable for use in winter. See Brunning (June 2010), p. 6. The history of some words in this group is instructive and amusing. The term Volksetymologie was coined in the nineteenth century by a German scholar and soon spread all over the world. Perhaps even in Old English, the word fell victim to the pressure of folk etymology and m did appear under the influence of worm?

There is another kind of ancient folk remedy that has developed into a modern medicine: deadly nightshade.

As in the discussion of wormwood, my goal was to show how people try to make words mean what words are supposed to mean. You could not be signed in, please check and try again. [4][5][6][7] It is widely cultivated as a vegetable crop. Furthermore, there is an even older name for it that goes back to Old English: foxglove. The stalks are thick or thin from the moment they sprout from the ground.[39]. German metzeln means to butchery, slaughter, and the corresponding noun is Metzelei. As these are more present in young asparagus, this accords with the observation that the smell is more pronounced after eating young asparagus. Unfortunately, werm makes little sense. Louis Lemery, Treatise of All Sorts of Food, 1702. To add more confusion to this type of reasoning, stained sycamore wood is hare or hairwood, though it has nothing to do with either hares or hair. saltcellar: A bowl or other container for salt was in Old French called a salier; this term, transformed by folk etymology into cellar, was redundantly attached to the English word salt to describe such an object. Words, as linguistics tells us, are conventional signs. Years later, someone came up with the same image in the film Alien. Online Etymology Dictionary. It has been well-preserved in several forms in Modern German, for example, in Heim-at homeland (heim home), Arm-ut poverty (arm poor), Ein-d-e desert, wasteland (ein one), and others. Yet one thing seems to be rather certain. The classical Latin form of the word is attested in English from mid-16c., but was limited at first to herbalists and botanists; the common form from 17c.-19c. Alas, vowels, not worms, bother etymologists. prostratus (Dumort.) Given this interpretation, the second syllable will remain a suffix. The plant at the front is Ornithogalum pyrenaicum, commonly called wild asparagus, and sometimes "Bath asparagus". PRINTED FROM OXFORD REFERENCE (www.oxfordreference.com). White asparagus is very popular in Europe and western Asia. Yet worms are indeed afraid of wormwood. Only seasonally on the menu, asparagus dishes are advertised outside many restaurants, usually from late April to June. You first need to remove the woody part at the base of the stem.

[69] This study pinpointed a single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) in a cluster of olfactory genes associated with the ability to detect the odor. It was once classified in the lily family, like the related Allium species, onions and garlic. All this information came from the wonderful Online Etymological Dictionary. Its young shoots are used as a spring vegetable. For the French style, asparagus is often boiled or steamed and served with Hollandaise sauce, White sauce, melted butter or most recently with olive oil and Parmesan cheese. Such a suffix did exist in Germanic. Retrieved $(datetime), from https://www.etymonline.com/word/asparagus. Older, thicker stalks can be woody, although peeling the skin at the base removes the tough layer.

Belated comment on Folklore and etymology imps and elves (March 3rd 2021): Such blends exist. One consolation is that the German cognate of wormwood is Wermut (Anglicized as Wermouth or Vermouth and now producing another wrong association, this time with mouth! It is usually dioecious, with male and female flowers on separate plants, but sometimes hermaphrodite flowers are found. Sprue has thin stems.[25]. [39] Thickness and thinness are not an indication of tenderness or toughness. From the French "[] changer mon pot de chambre en un vase de parfum", The French Chef; Asparagus From Tip to Butt, https://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2016-3.RLTS.T176377A19392993.en, "The French Chef; Asparagus From Tip to Butt", "Excretion and Perception of a Characteristic Odor in Urine after Asparagus Ingestion: a Psychophysical and Genetic Study", "Food idiosyncrasies: beetroot and asparagus", "Why Your Pee Smells Funny After Eating Asparagus", "The proof is in the pee: Population asparagus urinary odor kinetics", "New breed of early asparagus hits the shelves", "Asparagus: this season's hottest shades to grow", "Growing Asparagus in the Home Garden; Section on harvesting", USDA Agricultural Research Service Data section 11 (pg 61), "Food and Agriculture Organisation Statistics (FAOSTAT)", "Asparagus in autumn? [52], In western Himalayan regions, such as Nepal and north-western India wild asparagus is harvested as a seasonal vegetable delicacy known as Kurilo or Jhijhirkani.[53]. Digitalis has been used in folk medicine for over 400 years, and it does have some genuine benefits. See this article: Oceana County, Michigan, the self-proclaimed "asparagus capital of the world" hosts an annual festival complete with a parade and asparagus queen;[76] The Vale of Evesham in Worcestershire is the largest producer within Northern Europe,[citation needed] celebrating with the annual British Asparagus Festival involving auctions of the best crop, an "Asparagus Run" modelled on the Beaujolais Run and a weekend "Asparafest" music festival.[77]. [78], Wild asparagus sauteed with garlic, naam plaa, and soy sauce. Anatoly Libermanis the author ofWord Origins And How We Know Themas well asAn Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. In Turkish, asparagus is known as kukonmaz,[24] literally "[a] bird won't land [on it]", in reference to the shape of the plant. The link was not copied. Asparagus season in the UK very short, going from only May until June. Asparagus is also infamous for a certain side-effect after it has been eaten and digested: the distinctive smell it leaves in our urine, which is liked by some, but hated by others: [Asparagus] cause a filthy and disagreeable smell in the urine, as everybody knows. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.