writers.com feature:

Confessions of a Word Wonk

By Paula Guran

"Mr. ___," my son announced at the supper table, "said a tomato was a vegetable, not a fruit."

"But -- " I began.

"Yeah, yeah, I know it's a fruit and I told him so. But why is a fruit?"

I probably should have *just* explained about the botanical difference. (The simplest way to put it is that a fruit has seeds and a vegetable does not.) Instead, I said, "Tell him it is because of a taxes and the Supreme Court."

I admit it. I was being educational again. Mothers do these things. We're like human PBS stations without the pledge breaks. Do it long enough (like me) and you can't stop yourself.

"Huh?" (Yes, "huh?", "duh?", and "dude?" are acceptable responses in this context.)

"Back at the end of 19th century Congress imposed a ten percent tariff on imported vegetables to help protect farmers in the U.S. A few years later some smart importer-dude said, 'Hey, tomatoes are fruits! I shouldn't have to pay this ten percent.' His case eventually went to the Supreme Court and they rejected the truth -- that the tomato is a fruit (really sort of a huge berry) -- and declared that since everybody thought of it as a vegetable (they ate it with their dinners and not as a dessert like they did other fruits) the it was a vegetable. So the importer had to pay the tax and so did everyone else and, as a matter of fact, there's still a tariff paid on imported tomatoes."

"Dude," mumbled Middle Son, "She's doing it again -- "

"Of course, it's all sort of ironic --" (I was losing my audience. Had to change tactics.) "I mean the whole thing about importing tomatoes -- since the tomato wasn't known outside the western hemisphere until the Europeans came over."

"Spaghetti?" asked Eldest Son, "Pizza? Italians?" (He doesn't use verbs much when eating.)

"Right, no tomato sauce till after the white guy discoverer dudes. Same thing with potatoes." (I try to speak their language.)

"Potatoes...Irish...Famine." (He's a history major.)

"Yeah, but that was later. Took a century or two for either potatoes or tomatoes to be considered food for most Europeans. Northern Europeans thought they were poisonous. Both plants are members of the nightshade family like deadly nightshade and mandrake and belladonna and tobacco, so that makes some sense. But another reason they were thought unfit for human consumption by some was because they weren't mentioned in the Bible. Tobacco, of course, wasn't in the Bible and WAS accepted even though it was in the same family and contained one of the most poisonous plant alkaloids. 'Course they smoked that. Didn't eat it."

"I thought we were talking about tomatoes?"

"We are." I said. "You want to know how what connects tomatoes to witchcraft and werewolves?""

"I knew it," said the youngest. "She's going to bring horror stuff into this..."

"Mom, why do you know so much useless stuff?" That was the middle son.

"Because of etymology. Word origins. Just words. The word 'tomato' came from an Aztec word for it and that led to me knowing all this other stuff."

"Are we going to talk about Aztec ritual sacrifice again?" said the youngest -- somewhat gleefully.

"Not at the dinner table. We're talking about tomatoes. And werewolves. See, in Germany the word for tomato translates to 'wolf peach'..."*

Words.

I'm a word wonk†. For some reason I am fascinated by and learn from words. Learning definitions and origins and uses of words leads me to learn more about history, psychology, sociology, mythology, geography, folklore, politics, other languages, and more. Or seemingly unrelated facts get processed into unusual configurations; bits of information adhere to my brain in new patterns. Knowing lots of words also makes me a wizard at Web research.

I'm not referring to the "vocabulary building" techniques of rote memorization. Those usually offer only a single meaning often geared toward making a simplistic connection gained through more memorization -- that of Greek stems and Latin roots and "common" prefixes and suffixes.

This puts a lot of words into your brain (probably temporarily). You can use the knowledge to get higher test scores, but that's about all it does.

Recently the editors of THE AMERICAN HERITAGE COLLEGE DICTIONARY came up with "100 Words That All High School Graduates -- And Their Parents -- Should Know." These words were chosen carefully -- probably by folks who are either bigger word wonks than I am. Many of the 100 them important to know not just for their own sakes, but because their origins or "connections" lead you to further understanding or knowledge. (You can read more about this and find the list of words at the Houghton Mifflin site.

Take "gerrymander," for instance:

ger• ry• man• der (jr-mndr, gr-) tr.v. -dered, -der• ing, -ders To divide (a geographic area) into voting districts so as to give unfair advantage to one party in elections.§ n. 1. The act, process, or an instance of gerrymandering. 2. A district or configuration of districts differing widely in size or population because of gerrymandering. [After Elbridge Gerry + (sala)mander (< the shape of an election district created while Gerry was governor of MA).]

You certainly can't learn *that* one from a Greek stem or a list of suffixes. It might even lead you to wanting to know something about that era in American politics or today's politics. (My own congressional district was recently gerrymandered. It's definitely a relevant word.)

The dictionary editors claim the quality of a person's vocabulary has a direct effect on his or her success in college and in the workplace. I'm not sure that's true. It's a little like memorizing words to help you pass standardized tests: If you are lucky, passing those tests will pay off with a degree that can be parlayed into a lucrative career. But there's no assurance of that. After all, if my vocabulary had a direct effect on my success I'd probably at least HAVE a workplace.

Nor can you convince me that the old cliché "Those who have a command of words command the greatest power," is valid. No matter what your opinion of George W. Bush is, he doesn't seem to possess a great mastery of words. On a more personal level, I know I've had bosses who couldn't command an apostrophe let alone master words. Didn't seem to stop them from being in charge (and even from having accumulated considerable amounts of that popular American success-equivalent -- money.)

Maybe we don't even need so many words. (No one knows exactly how many words there are in the English language because it's difficult to define what "a word" is. But there are a lot.) Back in 1930, Charles K. Ogden published a book, BASIC ENGLISH: A GENERAL INTRODUCTION WITH RULES AND GRAMMAR, that simplified English down to 850 words. He removed redundancies and eliminated words that can be replaced by combinations of simpler words. He found that 90% of the concepts in a standard dictionary can be expressed with 850 words. (Find out more at the Basic English Web site.

But, I'm a word wonk. I like to be able to use burnish or polish or shine or buff or furbish or glance or glaze or gloss or rub or shine or brighten. When I get interested in why we call some *thing* by a particular grouping of letters I sometimes wind up exploring strange locations and learning interesting "stuff." Just read yjr "Roots" section of an edition of our monthly newsletter or one of the "Tangents" in The Word Book from Writers.com" to see what I mean. and see what I mean.

Is such "stuff" useless these days?

I'll leave that for you to decide.

* * *

* When this was originally published, A Faithful Reader, whose native tongue is German, wrote to us about the "wolf peach." She said she'd never heard of such a word. I went back to my sources and did further research. This is where I got the notion:

"I Say Tomayto, You Say Tomahto..." by Sam Cox
http://lamar.colostate.edu/~samcox/Tomato.html)
"Old German folklore has it that witches used plants of the nightshade family to evoke werewolves, a practice known as lycanthropy. The common German name for tomatoes translates to "wolf peach", and was avoided for obvious reasons. In the 18th century Carl Linnaeus conjured up binomial nomenclature to name species, and took note of this legend when he named the tomato Lycopersicon esculentum, which literally means, "edible wolf peach"]."

Mr. Cox cites: "Cutler KD. 1998. From Wolf Peach to Outer Space. www.bbg.org/gardening/kitchen/tomatoes/cutler.html"

That particular page is missing, but a site search resulted in http://www.bbg.org/gar2/topics/kitchen/handbooks/tomatoes/1.html which mentions the wolf peach thusly, "Or I might have called the tomato a wolf peach, from its genus name Lycopersicon..." No mention of German. The reference might be found in Ms Cutler's book, Tantalizing Tomatoes: Smart Tips & Tasty Picks for Gardeners Everywhere, but it's not on the Brooklyn Botanic Garden (bbg.org) Web site.

The only other direct reference I could find came from a PDF (https://courseware.vt.edu/users/jelesko/ppws2984%20end%20of%20spring% 202001/lecture_outlines_pdf/lecture_outline_5.pdf)
Lecture Outline 5, February 6, 200: Tomato Domestication (LECTURE SYLLABUS for "Domesticating the Gene: Plants, Plagues, and the Dawn of the Genomic Era" at Virginia Tech)
"...(D) 6. Germans believed eating tomatoes could turn one into werewolf (hence, the German name "wolf peach") (D) 7. Latin name (Lycopersicon esculentum) = "juicy wolf peach"..."

There are plenty of etymological references for Lycopersicon esculentum meaning means edible wolf's peach (or some variant), but the "common German connection" remains unproven.

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§ Is "wonk" a word? Definitely, but its meaning varies. In this case I use it to mean "someone who studies and cares, perhaps excessively, about all the details of a subject."

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