Sometimes I worry that I’ll describe the origin of a word incorrectly because I get my Greek and Latin roots confused. At this distance, it’s easy to see all the Greek and Roman words and deities as a combined source rather than remembering that Greek and Latin are two distinct languages representing different cultures and different times. And, in fairness to 21st century humans trying to keep things straight, Latin borrowed from Greek, and the sciences have sometimes taken words from both languages to describe the same thing.
In a post last week about chemical elements named for places, I mentioned the name tellurium, which comes from the Latin goddess of the Earth, Tellus. Actually, the Romans used two terms to refer to Earth: Tellus and Terra, or Terra Mater (mother Earth). The latter name may be an outright borrowing of the Greek religious concept of mother Earth, Gaea (or Gaia, or Ge Mater).
Both the Greek and the Roman names for mother Earth come down to us in science, in part because eventually Latin borrowed the prefix geo from Greek. Ge Mater is obviously the inspiration of geology, geography, geodesy, geometry, and geode. Terra Mater is where we get terrestrial (and terrain, and terrarium).
There’s a similar split in the names for things associated with the moon. The Greek goddess of the moon, Selene, gave her name to the element selenium and to the study of the moon, selenology. However, the term lunar, derived from the name of the Roman moon goddess Luna, is much more prominent, and selenology is generally called lunar science. Mars and Martian come from the Roman god, but we also use areology, from the Greek god Ares, to describe the study of the…errr..geology of Mars.
I suspect I’m not the first one to be confused; selenium was named after the moon analogously to tellurium after Earth, but selenium is from the Greek deity and tellurium is from the Roman deity. Furthermore, the term aurora borealis gets aurora from the Roman goddess of the dawn (for its beautiful colors) and borealis from the Greek god of the north wind, Boreas.
I’ll try hard to keep my roots straight, but I can’t feel too bad about seeing Greek and Latin as, if not a single source, at least two deeply interconnected sources.
This is the third and final post in a series on some of the most glorious plant families of the summer garden and orchard. Part 1 covered cucurbits, and part 2 discussed nightshades. Today the drupes of the Prunus family have their turn.
The genus Prunus includes plums, apricots, cherries, and peaches, among other stone fruits. This type of fruit, a fleshy mass surrounding a large pit, is called a drupe. Drupe comes from the Greek word for olive, a fine representative of the type.
The plums we eat are generally Prunus domestica. The Greeks called them prounon, and the Romans called them prunus. The Latin name worked its way into Germanic languages with an R instead of an L, giving us the word plums, at least when they’re fresh. The dried ones are prunes, although I understand that this word has become so firmly associated with constipation and old age that the prune-sellers are pushing the term “dried plums.” Plums gave their name to the entire Prunus genus.
The Romans called peaches malum Persicum, for Persian apple; the scientific name retains the Persian attribution: Prunus persica, or Persian plum. Although the Romans obviously thought that the peach came from Persia, its genes tell a different story: it probably came from China before making its way to Persia and thence to the Romans and eventually the rest of us. Time changed the shortened Latin name persica to pessica and then to pesca; at that point (medieval Latin), it made its way into French as peche, and then into English as peach.
The peach shares a subgenus, Amygdalus, with the almond. (If you look inside a peach pit, you’ll see a little kernel that bears more than a passing resemblance to an almond. This kernel contains a compound that can decompose into hydrogen cyanide. Opinions differ on how dangerous these things are to consume, but I’m going to play it safe and advise you not to eat them, feed them to the dog, or otherwise oversee their ingestion.) I mention the Amygdalus subgenus so that I can also mention that the amygdala in your brain got its name because it’s almond-shaped.
Apricots are currently Prunus armenaica (which translates as Armenian plum), but their first official botanical name was Mala armenaica (another apple!). Again, though, they actually originated in China. The English name comes from the Latin word praecoquis by a very circuitous route. The Latin word means “early ripening”; apricots were originally thought to be a type of peach that ripened earlier than the peaches people already knew about. From Latin, the word traveled into Greek, where it sprouted a variant plural form, berikókkia. Arabic borrowed that word as barqūq, and that’s the name that southwestern Europe got hold of during the period of Muslim rule in the Iberian peninsula. The word entered English as abrecock, probably from a Spanish variant on the Arabic term. French picked it up, probably from the same source, as abricot, and that spelling likely influenced the shift in the English word to its present form in the late 16th century. Whew!
Cherry has a much simpler story: from Greek kerasós to Latin ceresia or cerasia and on into Old French as emcherise (and thence to today’s French word for this fruit, cerise). The English word lost the s at the end because it was misconstrued as indicating the plural. Something similar happened to pease, which was originally a collective (non-count) noun, like interference, that could be used as a singular noun if you needed to refer to a single pea. However, because people took it for a plural word, the singular word pea was formed from it. Anyway, the cherries we eat are generally either Prunus avium (the sweet kind) or Prunus cerasus (the sour kind). Prunus avium can be translated as bird cherry, which will make a lot of sense to anyone who has had to share a cherry tree with the birds.
One last note, and a brief foray into another genus. The genus Prunus is in the family Rosaceae, which contains not just roses but apples and pears, and also the genus Rubus, which contains raspberries and blackberries. This is one of my very favorite groups of summer fruits. Not only are raspberries among the most luscious and luxurious of summer edibles, they’re representatives of a type of fruit with a cool name: drupelets. They’re called that because they consist of many small drupes.
It’s a little late for any of these drupes at the Farmer’s Market in my part of the country; I saw peaches and plums and even raspberries a couple of weeks ago, but they’re probably about finished. If you’re lucky enough that these summer yummies are still around, enjoy them in all their fresh local splendor.
If you are hoping to find your own local cucurbits, nightshades, and drupes, you might be interested in Local Harvest, which will help you find Farmer’s Markets, CSAs, and more in your area.
A surprising number of chemical elements are named for places. (Well, it surprised me, anyway.)
Many of the elements that have been identified since the late 18th century are named for their places of discovery. Would you have guessed that more of these elements are named for Scandinavia or Scandinavian cities than for any other geographical location? One town, Ytterby, accounts for no fewer than four of the names: erbium, terbium, ytterbium, and yttrium. There is also hafnium (from Hafnia, the Latin name for Copenhagen), holmium (from Holmia, or Stockholm), scandium (from Scandia, or Scandinavia), and thulium (from another ancient name for Scandinavia, or the far north: Thule).
Here are the other “modern” elements named for places:
The continent of Europe has its namesake, Europium.
Francium and gallium (from the Latin Gallia) are named for France, although the latter may also a pun on the middle name of its discoverer, Paul-Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran; le coq, French for rooster, is gallus (chicken) in Latin. Lutetium comes from Lutetia, the Latin name for what would become Paris.
Germanium, of course, is named for Germany, and Hassium comes from the Latin name for Hesse in Germany. Rhenium is named for a river, the Rhine (Rhenus in Latin), and Darmstadtium is named for the city of its discovery, Darmstadt.
Polonium is named for Poland, the homeland of its discoverer, Marie Curie.
Strontium is named for the small town of Strontian, Scotland, where the first specimen known to contain it was found in a lead mine.
Ruthenium comes from the Latin name for Russia, Ruthenia. Dubnium is named for the Russian research institute where it was discovered.
Four elements are named for locales in the US. The series of names Berkelium, Californium, and Americium reads like a peculiar rendering of an address. Berkelium is joined by Livermorium, named only last year for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
A couple of the element names have a longer history:
Copper takes its name from Cyprus (Kupros to the Greeks), which was a huge source of copper in ancient times. (It’s possible, however, that the island took its name from the metal.) The Latin Cyprium aes (metal from Cyprus) was shortened to cuprum (which accounts for the Cu on the periodic table).
As I noted in an earlier post, The Magnetes legacy, magnesium and manganese both take their names from an area in ancient Greece called Magnesia.
This may seem a bit of a stretch, but astronomical objects can be considered places too. (Just ask any astronaut who’s been to the moon.) The following elements are named for places in the solar system:
Helium was first identified from its lines in the solar spectrum, and its name comes from the Greek name for the sun, helios.
Tellurium comes from the Latin tellus, or Earth. Selenium resembles tellurium and is named, by analogy, for the moon, although selene is the Greek word for the moon, not the Latin word.
Cerium and palladium are named for the first and second asteroids ever discovered, Ceres and Pallas, which were each discovered a couple of years before their respective elements.
Uranium, neptunium, and plutonium are named for the planets Uranus and Neptune and the dwarf planet Pluto. The celestial objects in turn take their names from the Greek god of the sky, the Roman god of the sea, and the Greek god of the underworld. (Mercury the planet and Mercury the element were both named for the Roman god Mercury, so Mercury the element is not named for the planet.)
And finally, how about a place named for an element? Argentina got its name from the Latin word for silver, argentum.
Sweet red peppers, a variety of Capsicum annuum. These are waiting to be roasted and marinated.
Welcome to part 2 in a series of posts about the late summer garden harvest. (Part 1, on the cucurbits, is here; part 3, on the drupes, is here.) Today we’re going to look at the Solanaceae, or nightshades.
Solanaceae is a large family that includes edible species such as tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and potatoes, along with a great many other things (petunias, the hallucinogenic datura, and the poisonous deadly nightshade, for example). The origin of the name Solanaceae is unclear, but it may rest on an association of certain plants in the family with either the sun or with a soothing effect produced by ingesting them.
Sweet peppers, chili peppers, and tomatoes are New World plants. Those lovely things on the left are red peppers, fine specimens of the species Capsicum annuum, which is the most common of the cultivated Capsicum species.
Columbus brought back some variety of Capsicum annuum to Europe, and it was given the common name pepper because it was spicy, like the unrelated black pepper that Europeans were already familiar with, although it packed more of a punch. It’s not clear where the genus name Capsicum came from, although it may be derived from the Latin capsa, or box, presumably for the blocky hollow shape of many varieties. Capsaicin, the name of the compound that gives chili peppers their heat, is derived from capsicum.
The tomato, quintessential summer harvest and beloved of gardeners today, was once considered poisonous in Europe and North America. Columbus introduced it to Europe after his first voyage to the New World (it probably first appeared in Peru or Mexico). The plant’s resemblance to deadly nightshade made it an object of suspicion, although it also made it possible for Linnaeus to correctly classify it as belonging to the same family, the Solanaceae.
An early common name in Europe was the German wolfpirisch, or wolf peach. The peach part was for its physical appearance, and the wolf part comes from a belief that the tomato, like nightshade, could be used to conjure werewolves. (Definitely an unsavory plant, then, in this early view.)
The scientific name is Solanum lycopersicum, and the species name lycopersicum is essentially the Latin version of wolf peach. As we saw in an earlier post, lyco comes from the Greek word for wolf; malum persicum, or Persian apple, is what the Romans called peaches. (We’ll learn more about peaches later in the week when we talk about the drupes in the genus Prunus.) The wolfish connection lingers, linguistically anyway, in the name lycopene, which refers to an antioxidant compound found in tomatoes (and also red peppers, incidentally). The English common name, tomato, comes from the Nahuatl word tomatl.
Other early common names indicate more favorable views of the tomato. The Italian pomodoro, or golden apple, suggests the relative speed with which Italian cooks (and eaters) adopted the tomato, first as decoration for the table and then as edible and even tasty. The French pomme d’amour or love-apple reflects the belief that it was an aphrodisiac.
In England and North America, it took longer to persuade people that tomatoes were harmless. I’ve read of people growing what they called love-apples as ornamental potted plants in 1850s America, believing they were poisonous to eat but appealing to the eye. There are competing stories for what finally moved tomatoes from poisonous to palatable in the public mind in the US, and the truth is shrouded in mystery. Suffice it to say that when Campbell’s condensed tomato soup was introduced in 1897, the tomato was in the kitchen, and the garden, to stay.
We’ll look at one more nightshade, this one from India rather than the Americas. The eggplant probably reached Europe some time in the early Middle Ages. The English common name is traced back to yellow or white varieties grown in the 17th century that looked something like goose eggs or hen’s eggs. The scientific name, Solanum melongena, has a more complicated history. Byzantine Greek borrowed and adapted the Arabic name, which in turn came from a Dravidian word. The Greek version, melitzána, then made it into medieval Latin, there to be picked up by botanists when it came time to assign an official name. Another Arabic word eventually morphed into the French aubergine and similar words in other languages.
Later in the week, we’ll close this series with part 3, which will look at the drupes of the genus Prunus.
Sand dunes ripple within an impact crater in Noachis Terra on Mars. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona
Given that the Mars rover Curiosity is in the news (it did not find methane in the planet’s atmosphere, contrary to earlier reports), this seems like a good time to pass along something I learned this week about the geological periods on Mars.
Mars is currently not a very happening place, geologically speaking—at least in terms of big events like volcanic eruptions and such. Its geological history is divided into three major periods, the latest of which has lasted for three billion years and counting. (The Earth has four periods, most of which are subdivided fairly finely.) Each period is named for a place on the Martian surface where features typical of that time period appear. The interesting thing to me, as a word geek, is that an alternative naming system has been proposed based on the geochemical events that were going on during each period. First, the current names:
Noachian: This period is named for Noachis Terra, a plain in the southern hemisphere that features some of the oldest landscapes on Mars, including large eroded craters. There may have been water: drainage networks formed by flowing water, and possibly even bodies of surface water. There were definitely impacts. This period lasted until about 3.7 billion years ago.
Hesperian: Hesperia Planum, also in the southern hemisphere, is a large lava plain. In Greek and Roman times, Hesperia was used to refer to the western regions. (For the Greeks, this was Italy; for the Romans, it was Spain.) Hesperus was the name given to Venus when it was visible in the evening, and the Hesperides were the nymphs who lived in a beautiful garden at the far western edge of the world. During the period named for this landform, there were lava flows and there was massive flooding that created outflow channels. It lasted until about three billion years ago (give or take; the boundary is fuzzy).
Amazonian: Amazonis Planitia, named after the mythical women warriors the Amazons, is a relatively young, smooth plain in the northern hemisphere, west of Olympus Mons. This period covers the last three billion years; there were lava flows (but not recently), glacial and other ice-related activity, and a whole lot of surface weathering.
The new names are:
Phyllocian: This runs through the early Noachian, about four billion years ago, and is named for the clay (phyllosilicate) minerals that formed during this period. The phyllo in phyllosilicate is the same root as in phyllo dough, and it goes back to a Greek word for leaf. Phyllosilicate minerals consist of parallel sheets, or leaves, of silicate tetrahedra.
Theiikian: During this period, volcanoes provided sulfur dioxide, which combined with water to form sulfuric acid, ultimately leading to the formation of silicate minerals. Thion, the Classical Greek word for sulfur, was adapted for the name of this period, which lasted until about three and a half billion years ago.
Siderikan: Think rust. After the volcanoes went quiet and liquid water all but disappeared, the rocks on the surface sat and oxidized, as they do to this day. This period is named for the iron oxides that give Mars its orange-red color. In Classical Greek, the word for iron is sidéros.
So there you have it. Enjoy your weekend, and if you get the chance, look for Hesperus, aka Venus, in the west just after sunset.
My last post was about the link between the words melancholy and choler, which are based on the Greek word for bile. Melancholy and choler were associated with black bile and yellow bile, respectively, which were two of the four humors in a system of ancient and medieval medicine. The humors were different fluids in the human body, and diseases were believed to arise from imbalances among them.
The English word humor in this sense came from French, which got it from Latin, specifically umor, or body fluid, which is related to the verb umere, or to be moist. The word humor in this sense is related to humid, which also has to do with dampness or moisture. Although the concept of four humors is a thing of the past, we still talk about the vitreous humor (literally glassy fluid), the gel-like substance that fills the eyeball between the lens and the retina.
The system of four humors was embedded in a complex web of associations. Each humor had its season and its organ in the body, and was thought to have attributes described by various permutations of the characteristics hot, cold, wet, and dry. For example, yellow bile, or choler, was thought to be hot, dry, and associated with summer and the spleen. (I haven’t been able to find out what it means for a fluid to be dry; perhaps this is some sort of figurative use, as in dry wine, but I don’t know.)
This system was intended to provide guidelines for treating illness. It was eventually extended to personality types, or temperaments. Each temperament was seen as a particular blending of the four humors; the word comes from the Latin temperare, meaning to mix. Galen, who devised this system, identified nine temperaments; the four that are the most familiar today are the ones that he called choleric, melancholic, sanguine, and phlegmatic, each associated with one of the humors.
Sanguine comes from the Latin word for blood, sanguis, because the sanguine temperament was believed to result from an excess of blood. A sanguine person is an upbeat happy sort. We still use this word to mean optimistic or cheerful, although we no longer think it has anything to do with a healthy ruddy complexion. You also see this Latin root in sanguinary, which means involving bloodshed or bloodthirsty. I was puzzled by the similarity between these words until I learned how they’re connected.
Phlegm is pretty much the phlegm we know, the only one of the humors to have made it down to today under the same name. Oddly enough, phlegm was thought to be cold and moist and associated with winter, but the Greek root from which it originally sprang, phlégma, has to do with inflammation and heat, which I suppose makes sense in the context of upper respiratory illnesses in which fever and phlegm coincide. The phlegmatic temperament was believed to be calm, even stolid or sluggish. The word is still used to describe calm, unemotional people.
In fact, although the humoral system of medicine and the concept of four temperaments have long since been overtaken by more sophisticated approaches1, the names of all four temperaments linger on as adjectives that describe people or attitudes. What is most interesting to me is that although we don’t think of optimism in terms of blood any more, or depression or calmness in terms of black bile or phlegm, the link connecting the bitter fluid bile with irritability or anger remains strong. You can talk about the bilious rant you had to listen to, read a comments thread on some news article and marvel at the bile-filled invective, or vent your spleen. (Just don’t vent it here, please.)
1 Well, more or less. The idea of four temperaments lives on, in mutated form, in some current personality systems, although psychology has pretty much settled on five aspects of personality known as the Big Five personality traits.↩
Learn more:
The History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine (part of the NIH) has an overview of ancient Greek medicine (from the gods to Galen, what more could you ask?).
You don’t see the string chol in too many words except for fairly specialized terms in biochemistry or medicine, so I had to wonder whether there’s some connection between the words choleric, melancholy, and cholesterol. There is, and you can throw the word cholera into the mix too.
Choler entered English around the 14th century as a borrowing from French, which got it from Latin. It meant either bile or a digestive complaint. The latter meaning ultimately came from the Greek word cholericós, or bilious, and in that sense, it’s the ancestor of cholera, which originally probably referred to a serious gastrointestinal disorder in general and not just to what we today identify as cholera.
Bile was once associated with irritability and bad temper. Choler, of course, appears in choleric, which is still used today to describe an individual who is behaving irascibly. It was once considered essentially a personality type or tendency resulting from a preponderance of yellow bile (more on the four humors and their personality types here).
Bile is synthesized in the liver and sent on to the gall bladder and thence to the duodenum (the upper part of the small intestine1), where it plays an important role in the digestion of fats. Cholesterol is a waxy white crystalline substance that is also made in the liver. It was first found in gallstones (gall is another word for bile), and was originally called cholesterin. The name was derived from two Greek roots, cholé, or bile, and stereós, or solid; the word cholesterol came into use in 1894.
So what about melancholy? It was originally thought of as a morose outlook associated with a preponderance of black bile. Black bile was one of the four humors, or fluids, in ancient and medieval medicine, and was thought to be secreted by the kidneys or spleen. The Greek roots are mélanos, or black, and cholé. Mélanos also contributed to melanin, the name of a black pigment in human hair, skin, and eyes, and melanoma, the name of a dark-colored malignant skin tumor.
Melancholy also entered English around the 14th century via French and, ultimately, Latin. It was originally spelled melancolie or malancolie. The latter spelling arose because of a false association with the French word mal, or sickness (from the Latin malum, meaning misfortune or harm).
So there you have it, a somewhat unlikely set of companion words.
1 The name duodenum is a shorter form of intestinum duodenum digitorum, which describes it as the intestine that is about as long as twelve finger-widths.↩
Learn more:
Although cholesterol is demonized today, it actually plays a vital role in your body. This Cholesterol Overview from How Stuff Works gives a fairly balanced picture.
Many, many words have been written on depression and melancholy. The Ode on Melancholy by John Keats is not a bad place to start.
This is perhaps the best time of year to visit the Farmers Market, with the tables and baskets full of tomatoes, red peppers, and colorful squash gleaming in the sunshine. Many mid- to late summer favorites belong to three groups: the family Cucurbitaceae, the family Solanaceae (or the nightshades), and the genus Prunus, which is in the family Rosaceae. This is the first in a series of three posts that will appear this month on the names of these delicious edibles.
We’ll start with the Curcubitaceae because really, who doesn’t appreciate a good cucurbit? (It’s pronounced cue-CUR-bit, by the way.) They take their name from the Latin word for gourd and include the cucumber, summer squash (zucchini and yellow squash), winter squash, cantaloupe, watermelon, and pumpkin.
Squash, summer and winter, including pumpkins, are New World fruits that belong to the species Cucurbita pepo. Botanically speaking, they’re fruits, not vegetables, because they are essentially the ripened ovaries that develop from the plant’s flowers. Vegetables, on the other hand, are edible parts of plants that do not include the ovaries. In fact, botanists use the name pepo for a particular type of fruit, a berry with a thick rind and fleshy center, because it’s characteristic of this species.
Cucurbita pepo was one of the first plants domesticated in the Americas, upwards of 10,000 years ago. The English word squash derives from a Narragansett word, askutasquash. (The 17th century seems like yesterday when you put it in the context of 10,000 years of agriculture.) At a conservative estimate, there are a bezillion varieties within this species, so I’ll mention only one of my favorites. The zucchini was developed in Italy long after the species was introduced from the Americas; its name is the diminutive of zucca, for pumpkin or squash.1 In France, the UK, and Ireland, it’s called a courgette, which is the diminutive of the French word for squash, courge.
Unlike the squash, the cucumbers and melons are Old World fruits. If you start to research the history of cucumbers, one of the first things you’re likely to learn is that the Roman emperor Tiberius was so enamored of Cucumis sativus, the cucumber that graces our tables today, that portable raised beds were used to make them available year-round. These contraptions were wheeled about to catch the sunshine and covered to protect the plants in cold weather. (Sativus, which means cultivated, describes plants that have been domesticated; we’ll see it in other names as well.)
This seems like a lot of work just to have cucumbers all year.2 Tomatoes, yes, or basil, or raspberries, but cucumbers? Well, evidently yes, but probably not Cucumis sativus. A 2008 paper suggests that for centuries the word cucumis (and other terms in Greek and Hebrew) were erroneously translated or misunderstood. The evidence from written works and images of the time indicates that people living around the Mediterranean were actually eating what we would today call Armenian cucumbers (aka snake melon, snake cucumber, or “those big long ones you see sometimes at the grocery store”).
The Armenian cucumber is a variety within the genus Cucumis melo, which is mostly muskmelons. (Technically, it is a muskmelon, but it’s hardly a representative one.) The muskmelons, like the squash, come in a dizzying array of varieties, from the musky-smelling cantaloupe to the less fragrant honeydew (a member of the cultivar group Cucumis melo Inodorus). The species name melo ultimately comes from the Greek word melopepon, which combines the word for apple (melon) and gourd (pepon). (The name pumpkin also came indirectly from pepon.)
Watermelons, which differ markedly from the muskmelons, are another species entirely, Citrullus lanatus, which originated in Africa. Because the average watermelon contains more than 90% water, the source of the common name is obvious. Citrullus is probably derived from a Latin name for a type of cucumber (maybe we’re starting to chase our tails here). Lanatus, the Latin word for woolly, describes the hairy leaves and stems of the plant.
Next week we’ll continue our trip through the Farmer’s Market by looking at the nightshades. Bon appétit.
1 The Italian words are actually zucchina (singular) and zucchine (plural); these words are feminine in gender. However, the masculine form (zucchino, zucchini) is also used in Italy. This information may be useful to those people who like to talk about having one spaghetto.↩
2 I like cucumbers, but I can live without them in the winter. In 1917, Good Housekeeping responded to a reader’s question about whether cucumbers are safe to eat with even fainter praise: “There is not enough nutriment in cucumbers to make any fuss about, but they are a condimental substance and are perfectly wholesome when properly masticated.” (Vol. 65, July-December 1917) I think they’re not quite as nutritiously null as Good Housekeeping thought back then.↩
Here in the middle of this bafflingly quiet Atlantic hurricane season, I thought I’d look at the words hurricane and typhoon. Both words refer to the same thing, a large tropical cyclone (that is, an organized low pressure system over warm tropical or subtropical water). Which name is used depends on where they occur (hurricanes in the Atlantic and parts of the eastern Pacific, typhoons in the western Pacific).
Hurricane is ultimately a New World word that has a fairly straightforward lineage, although it went through many different spellings (the Oxford English Dictionary lists 39) before finally settling down. When the Spanish encountered the native peoples of the Caribbean (specifically, the Taino of Puerto Rico and also the Arawak and Carib Indians) in the 16th century, they learned about the god of disorder who was thought to control the weather. Juracán was the Spanish spelling for the name of this god. This morphed into the Spanish word huracán. The word entered English with many variant spellings, such as harrycain and hurlecane, and eventually became hurricane.
Typhoon, on the other hand, is a very well-traveled word with a long pedigree. In Greek mythology, Typhon (whirlwind) was the name of a giant who was known as the father of the winds. The Arabic word tufan for a large storm may have been based on the Greek word typhon. At any rate, the word traveled east with Arabic-speaking invaders to India in the 11th century. Toofan is still used to refer to a large storm in India. Early European explorers may have gotten the word from Arab pilots; it entered the English language as tufan or touffon in the 16th century and was recorded as tuffoon in 1699. The Chinese had a similar-sounding phrase tai fung, for great wind. The further evolution of tuffoon into the current spelling, typhoon, may have been influenced by both the Chinese word and the Greek root.
Learn more:
FAQ from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on hurricane lingo
North America has seen a couple of impressive extratropical cyclones (large cyclones appearing outside of the tropics) in recent years; this Earth Observatory post showcases one from October 2010.
Two good books on hurricanes are Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History, by Erik Larson (find in library) and Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes, by Kerry Emanuel (find in library).
In my work as a science editor, I run across unfamiliar terminology. Sometimes it’s baffling, and sometimes it’s charming. Here are some recent examples of the charming kind.
Magnetic local time: OK, this one requires a bit of an intro. Universal Time (UT) is a timekeeping system in which the day arbitrarily begins when it’s midnight in Greenwich, England (at longitude 0°). Each location has its own local time (UT plus or minus so many hours) based on the difference between its longitude and that of Greenwich. The longitude lines used in this kind of timekeeping are part of a latitude–longitude grid that converges at Earth’s physical north pole. Similarly, you can make a grid of lines that converge on Earth’s magnetic north pole. Then the magnetic local time is midnight when your line of longitude faces away from the sun and noon when it faces the sun.
Petrichor: This lovely word describes the scent of rain on dry earth, which is an absolutely heavenly thing if you live in a dry climate. Certain plant oils (notably those of the creosote bush) are absorbed by the soil and stone of the desert floor and released into the air when it rains, along with another compound from the wet soil, producing the heady aroma. The word is derived from the Greek word for stone (petros) and the Greek word ichor, which was what the gods of Greek mythology supposedly had instead of blood. (The words petroleum and petrify can also be traced back to petros.) This scent lies behind the title of a beautiful book that Gary Paul Nabhan wrote about the Sonoran desert and the Tohono O’Odham people who live there: The Desert Smells Like Rain: A Naturalist in O’odham Country (find in library).
Crab and milliCrab: The Crab is a measure of the X-ray output of an astronomical source at a particular wavelength, pegged to that of the Crab nebula, a supernova remnant in the constellation of Taurus. Because the Crab nebula is a powerful X-ray source, milliCrabs (thousandths of a Crab) are often used.
Auroral chorus and dawn chorus: These are both radio waves that are naturally produced when energetic electrons are injected into in Earth’s magnetosphere; they can be converted into somewhat eerie singing sounds (chirps, hoots, whistles). The dawn chorus is most likely to occur around sunrise, and the auroral chorus is associated with aurorae. Curiously, both names can be traced back to Aurora, the Roman goddess of the dawn. The northern and southern lights (aurora borealis and aurora australis) were named for their beautiful subtle colors, which resemble those of sunrise.
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Must astronomers find a replacement for the milliCrab? This 2011 article from Physics World suggests they might because the X-ray emission from the Crab nebula varies too much to be a reliable standard.
