Since last week we looked into peach, I thought it would be fun to move to an autumn fruit this week and explore the history of the word apple.

Apple is from Old English, which means it’s been around pretty much forever. But it didn’t always mean that specific fruit we identify as an apple today. Nope, is used to mean “any kind of fruit.” (Excluding berries, but including nuts, interestingly.) And English isn’t the only language that can claim that. The same was true of the similar words in French, German, Dutch, Norse, Irish, and even Slavonic. That would be why we then get words like pomme de terre in French–“apple of the earth” for potato.

It also explains why the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the garden has come to be thought of as an apple. Because it was called an apple for hundreds of years–not because people meant that specific rosy-skinned, white-fleshed fruit, but because it simply meant FRUIT!

So, funny story. When we moved from our old house to one on my mother-in-law’s property, my daughter was distraught over leaving the beautiful old weeping cherry tree we had at the other house. So her grandmother promised to plant her one here. And so she did…or so she thought, anyway. We waited years for it to grow, and it soon became clear it wasn’t a weeping anything. But that was okay.

Then this year, Cherry (why, yes, we name our trees) began to bear fruit. And I gotta tell you, those, ahem, cherries, were the biggest, fuzziest, yellowest cherries we ever did see. 😉 Yeah…so either Nonna got the trees she’d ordered mixed up, or they sent her the wrong one, LOL. Because Cherry is most assuredly a peach tree. And at the moment, I have a giant bowl full of small but lovely peaches on my counter, waiting to be cut up and frozen. So of course–word of the week!

While the English word peach comes straight from the French word pesche of the same meaning, if you trace it back to the Latin, it actually gets interesting. The Latin word actually means “Persian apple.” Peach trees originated in China, apparently, but they came to Europe by way of Persia. In fact, in Ancient Greek, the word persikos could mean EITHER Persian or peach! They were that interchangeable! I had no idea. But the Persians must have really loved their peaches if it was the fruit other nations associated so fully with them.

Peach began to be applied to people in the 1700s. First to mean “attractive woman” in the 1750s and then “a good person” around 1900.

And they’ve been my son’s favorite fruit since around 2010, when he first bit into one. 😉 I swear that boy could eat a whole basket of them in a day if we let him… How about you? Are you a peach fan?

We’re all familiar with the word stamina, meaning “strength to resist, endurance.” But did you know that it comes from the Latin word for “threads”?

The Latin, in turn, is from the Greek stemon…a thread. Specifically, the thread that the three Fates spun, measured out, and snipped for each human life. If someone had a long life–exhibiting fortitude and endurance and resistance to the bad things that could end said life early–they were thought to have long “threads of life.” Much stamina.

And just as a bonus–if you haven’t brushed up on your Greek mythology lately, LOL, the three fates are Clotho (the one who spun the threads), Lachesis (the one who measured it out), and Atropos (the one who cuts it).

Did you know that our word enigma actually comes from the Greek word for “fable”? I hadn’t! But apparently so.

Said Greek word is ainos. And since a fable is a tale whose meaning/message has to be puzzled out, ainos let to a verb ainissesthai, which means (go figure) “to puzzle out.” Well, the Greek was of course adopted into Latin and changed a bit, to aenigma. Sound familiar? This was a noun, meaning (you guess it!) “a puzzling speech or riddle.”

It officially joined English as enimga in the 1530s.

It took a while for summer weather to really take hold for us this year in West Virginia…but man, it’s been full force in August! Heat and humidity all around–which we frequently describe as balmy. Which, as it turns out, probably isn’t actually a good word for it, LOL.

Balmy, in the sense mentioned above, should actually mean “mild, temperate.” It comes, after all, from balm, which is of course soothing. It had that meaning since the 1600s. But before that, it actually referred to another quality of balm–the fact that it’s scented. I had no idea that balmy originally meant “fragrant”! Did you? By the 1700s, in fact, it had combined the two to mean “mild, fragrant.”

But then an interesting meaning came along that I’ve never even heard of. It began to mean “weak-minded, idiotic, someone characterized by odd behavior.” Now, you may be going “Whaaaaaat?” like I was. That meaning came along in the 1850s…and was most likely a result of confusion. The word that actually meant that was barmy. Barm is the foam that rises to the top of some alcoholic beverages during the brewing process, which was believed to cause such odd behavior. Barmy, then, makes sense. But apparently, it was confused with balmy often enough in speech that the meaning got borrowed.

What’s the weather like in your neck of the woods right now?

This kind of qualifies as a head slap moment, LOL. So even as kid, I noticed how close pastor sounds and looks to pasture. And the fact that pastoral means “having to do with country life” was something I learned a long time ago. But I never actually paused to wonder why our word for a minister is so directly related to all this farm stuff.

But duh. It’s because pastor is actually directly from a Latin word, meaning…want to take a guess? “Shepherd.” Of course!! So it’s no wonder it shares a root with pasture.

It’s been a part of the English language since the 14th century and has pretty much always carried both meanings since pastor was used in Church Latin to denote those who tend the spiritual flock of souls. It didn’t become a verb, however, until the 1870s.