Potatoes
Jacquie and Rich are a
fabulous singer-songwriter duo called Small
Potatoes. They’ve been a big part of
the household soundtrack these days, so darned if they didn’t inspire this
post.
Potato entered English in the 1560s form the Spanish patata. The Spanish
borrowed the word from the people of Haiti, who called their native sweet
potato batata. The paler tuber brought to Europe in1565 from Peru is
the tuber most first-world folks think of today as the potato: the potato
of Idaho, of Ireland, of infamous emigration-inspiring famines,
though it wasn’t called a potato until 1590. Oddly, this
interloper was referred to both as the Virginia
potato
(geographic confusion, you say?), or the bastard
potato (at the time it had to
play second fiddle to the sweet potato).
The
word tuber
came to English in the 1660s from a Latin word meaning thick underground stem. It’s Proto-Indo-European root tubh-,
which meant to swell, also gave us
the word thigh.
My
preferred term for potatoes is spuds, a word first applied to our
friend the potato in New Zealand about 1845. Though nobody’s sure, spud
appears to have come to English from Danish or Old Norse, where it meant spear, lance, & spade. That third meaning might certainly lead to spud’s
modern meaning, though at some point in the 1680s English speakers also began
using the word spud to refer to a short stumpy person or thing. Hmmm.
Have
a minute? Check out Rich & Jacquie singing
a ridiculous Who’s-On-First type song all about a traveling salesman meeting
the Knott family: Shirley, Mae Bea & Wy.
Have
another minute? Please leave a comment about all these potato-related
etymologies, or about the musical group, Small Potatoes.
.
LOVE Small Potatoes, but I'd never heard them do that song. Hilarious! My mom's name was Shirley, so she was always stepping into those "surely" jokes. Like the time she phoned a friend whose husband was, unbeknownst to her, named Allen.. When the husband answered the phone, my mom said "this is Shirley Allen" and the hubby said "Yes, it surely is." Hilarity ensued.
ReplyDeleteIt's fascinating that the word for potato and thigh come from the same place. Because potatoes certainly go to my thighs!
Ahoy Anne,
ReplyDeletePotatoes go to all our thighs; surely they do!