Asparagus season in the UK very short, going from only May until June. )that is, if you are not teetotal and have a taste for fortified wines. Ewart Evans, George "Ask the Fellows who Cut the Hay". The history of some words in this group is instructive and amusing. was the folk-etymologized variant sparrowgrass, during which time asparagus had "an air of stiffness and pedantry" [John Walker, "Critical Pronouncing Dictionary," 1791]. It is no longer understood as a suffix (hence the multiplicity of forms, and the words with the remnants of it can belong to any of the three grammatical genders). If this derivation is correct, massacre was coined in the Germanic-speaking area, traveled to France, and then returnedindeed, not exactly home but closer to the place of birth. The smell has been reported to be detectable 15 to 30 minutes after ingestion[19][20] and subsides with a half-life of approximately four hours.[21]. A few Stems of Asparagus eaten, shall give our Urine a disagreeable Odour Asparagus "transforms my chamber-pot into a flask of perfume. Related: Asparaginous. The flowers are bell-shaped, greenish-white to yellowish, 4.56.5mm (31614in) long, with six tepals partially fused together at the base; they are produced singly or in clusters of two or three in the junctions of the branchlets. Meet the man behind its extended season", "Wit goud en koningin der groente: vorstelijke asperges", "Asparagus, royalty and the joys of seasonal eating", "Diversity and use of wild and non-cultivated edible plants in the Western Himalaya", "Letter to the Royal Academy of Brussels", "Food idiosyncrasies: Beetroot and asparagus", "Excretion and perception of a characteristic odor in urine after asparagus ingestion: A psychophysical and genetic study", "A polymorphism of the ability to smell urinary metabolites of asparagus", "Web-Based, Participant-Driven Studies Yield Novel Genetic Associations for Common Traits", Asparagus Production Management and Marketing, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Asparagus&oldid=1096769365, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles with unsourced statements from November 2008, All articles with vague or ambiguous time, Articles with unsourced statements from September 2017, Articles with disputed statements from May 2020, Articles with unsourced statements from March 2019, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 6 July 2022, at 14:35. Subscribers get access to our archives with 800+ interactive exercises! [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. Retrieved $(datetime), from https://www.etymonline.com/word/asparagus. The Bavarian city of Nuremberg feasts a week long in April, with a competition to find the fastest asparagus peeler in the region; this usually involves generous amounts of the local wines and beers being consumed to aid the spectators' appreciative support. Comment on The wiles of folk etymology(December 11th 2021: These are not typically grown in Britain, though you do spot them from time to time, though they have usually come from Holland or Belgium, where white asparagus is popular. Adopted into Middle English as mangrow, it evolved to its current form influenced by grove, meaning a stand of trees. Though absinthium wormwood was indeed used as a remedy against worms, the vowels in the words that interest us do not match.
Thus belfry, the part of a tower in which bells are hung, comes from Medieval Latin berfredus a tower, not from the English word bell; crap, excrement or faeces, comes from Middle Dutch krappe chaff and is not named after Thomas Crapper (18361910), the Victorian English sanitary engineer who contributed to the development of the siphonic flush toilet and whose aptronym is inscribed on a manhole cover, popular with brass-rubbers, in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey; penthouse, a top-floor flat, comes via Middle English pentis from Latin appendicium an appendage, not from English pent or house; and pickaxe, a large double-pointed garden tool, comes from Old French picois a mattock, not from English pick or axe. Hence, the man part. [40][41] As in continental Europe, due to the short growing season and demand for local produce, asparagus commands a premium price. cocktail: This term for a mixed alcoholic drink or, by extension, various mixtures of substances (as in fruit cocktail) has an uncertain origin, but it may derive from the French term coquetier (meaning egg cup), from the use of such containers to serve mixed drinks in the late eighteenth century. Etymologists try to show that once upon a time all words had meaningful beginnings, and occasionally they succeed. White and lavender-tipped are much more fibrous than the green but have a much more delicate flavour. 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. Years later, someone came up with the same image in the film Alien. mandrake often form the image of a man! It was called Mandrake the Magician. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Times, 1913, [Proust always overdid things have you ever read his description of madeleines?]. Some brands label shoots prepared in this way as "marinated". In recent years,[when?] Eric Partridge and the etymology of slang (part two), The hedging henchman and his hidden horse, An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction, https://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/runde-2/f09a-b/. Perhaps even in Old English, the word fell victim to the pressure of folk etymology and m did appear under the influence of worm?
Asparagus can also be pickled and stored for several years. Cover so that the asparagus part-boils and part-steams. Asparagus, or garden asparagus, folk name sparrow grass, scientific name Asparagus officinalis, is a perennial flowering plant species in the genus Asparagus. Only seasonally on the menu, asparagus dishes are advertised outside many restaurants, usually from late April to June. The chemical in question is called asparagusic acid, though not everyone has the ability to produce it (though most do) and not everyone has the ability to smell it (though most can). https://www.thefreedictionary.com/sparrowgrass, [C17: variant of asparagus, associated by folk etymology with sparrow and grass], Moses Gluckstein, a city gent and very pleasant and fond of, Suggested Reading: "Mexican War Vet Wages Deadliest Gunfight In American History" by Richard Fournier, VFW magazine, January 2012; "Captain Davis: A California Ballad," citing "The, Dictionary, Encyclopedia and Thesaurus - The Free Dictionary, the webmaster's page for free fun content, Spearing through spring: establish an asparagus bed and reap rewards for years, sparrow in the hand is better than the pigeon on the roof. It was anglicised to sperach or sperage in the 16th century, but strangely it was officially spelled as asparagus to be in line with Latin. I didnt know anything about drake being a version of dragon, but that makes sense, too. But we cannot be sure that such is the true story of massacre. We will use a demitasse to drink a demijohn of booze very slowly. werian to protect, defend (compare German wehren, familiar to many from Wehr-macht the defense branch of the Third Reich). However, genetic research places lilies, Allium, and asparagus in three separate familiesthe Liliaceae, Amaryllidaceae, and Asparagaceae, respectively the Amaryllidaceae and Asparagaceae are grouped together in the order Asparagales. Some of the movie reviewers pointed out that this was a flash-forward from 2001.
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. That kind of a spaceship came along again in 1968 in the extremely LONG spaceship Discovery One in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Asparagus spears of a middling thickness will take no longer than four minutes, and will most likely be done in three. By 16c. Older, thicker stalks can be woody, although peeling the skin at the base removes the tough layer. artichoke: The name of the vegetable stems ultimately from the Arabic word al-khurshf by way of the Spanish term alcarchofa and the Italian term arcicioffo (rendered articiocco in an Italian dialect), with the English form likely influenced by choke. Lastly, there is lavender-tipped asparagus which is simply white asparagus that has been allowed the see the sun again and just colour slightly. Emperor Augustus coined the expression "faster than cooking asparagus" for quick action. ", Asparagus contains asparagusic acid.
2. The plant name has nothing to do with worms; werm-d or wer-md, the association with worms seems to be a product of folk etymology. 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]. all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of [asparagus], they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeares Dream) at transforming my chamber pot into a vase of aromatic perfume. A bitter story: etymological gall and wormwood. Asparagus has been used as a vegetable owing to its distinct flavor, and in medicine due to its diuretic properties and its purported function as an aphrodisiac. Brunning uses the term "in print", though no printing technique was used in England at the time. Many German cities hold an annual Spargelfest (asparagus festival) celebrating the harvest of white asparagus. "Crowns" are planted in winter, and the first shoots appear in spring; the first pickings or "thinnings" are known as sprue asparagus. Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications by email. Wood, an extremely knowledgeable and prolific etymologist of the Chicago school, mocked the idea of s-mobile; however, this spurious but intractable element exists.) Serve on toast with some of the asparagus-flavoured butter and poached eggs. Corb., distinguished by its low-growing, often prostrate stems growing to only 3070 centimetres (1228in) high, and shorter cladodes 218mm (3322332in) long. Yet worms are indeed afraid of wormwood. This plant gives us belladonna. [38] The bottom portion of asparagus often contains sand and soil, so thorough cleaning is generally advised before cooking. [dubious discuss], By 1469, asparagus was cultivated in French monasteries. Purple asparagus differs from its green and white counterparts in having high sugar and low fibre levels. The top asparagus importers (2016) were the United States (214,735 tonnes), followed by Germany (24,484 tonnes), and Canada (19,224 tonnes). [42] U.S. production was concentrated in California, Michigan, and Washington. macerate and emaciate) and sacrare to consecrate (both forms are given here in their Modern Italian forms). 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] [69] This study pinpointed a single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) in a cluster of olfactory genes associated with the ability to detect the odor. 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. Such a suffix did exist in Germanic. 2 A popular misconception about the origin of a word. Anatoly Liberman's column on word origins,The Oxford Etymologist, appears on the OUPblog each Wednesday. mood, which in the Old English period meant mind, thought. Thus, keep-mind, thought-preserver, from a belief in its medicinal virtue? [62], Debate exists about the universality of producing the sulfurous smell, as well as the ability to detect it.
