I was reading a BBC article the other day about a “forgotten” fruit named the medlar. An interesting characteristic of this fruit is that you can’t eat it off the tree; if you do, you’ll get sick. Instead, you pick it, and then you store it for a couple of weeks while it (in effect) rots for a bit. You then have something that sounds not necessarily very appetizing (“like over-ripe dates mingled with lemons, and a slightly grainy texture”), but that apparently was popular for millennia.
So medlar was a term that was new to me. But the article also introduced me to the word bletting, which is this resting period that fruit undergoes in order to become edible. According to the article, the word bletting was invented in 1839 by a botanist who noticed that there was no name for this process.
I looked to see if that was true, and it appears so: the OED shows that the word appears in 1835 in a cite from a book by J. Lindley, who I think was the botanist in question.
How did Lindley come up with blet? From French, where the phrase devenir blet means “to become sleepy” and is used to mean becoming overripe. (I’m getting this from the OED, not from any first-hand knowledge of French.) Specifically, to become sleepy “as an over-ripe pear.” This makes sense, because pears are likewise a fruit that needs to rest after being picked so that they can soften. I do like the idea of fruit becoming sleepy, ha.
Which raises the question of how widely the verb to blet can be applied. Per Wikipedia, some other fruits that need bletting are persimmons and quince, along with the berries of mountain ash. I think that letting pears get soft on your kitchen counter is not quite the same thing as bletting. But some metaphoric uses of “sit around till you start rotting” suggest themselves, don’t they?
For origins today, the word metropolis, which had a mild surprise for me. (I would probably be less surprised by some of these etymologies if I knew Greek roots better.) I’ll go backward: the -polis part of metropolis comes from a Greek word meaning “city.” For example, the word acropolis, meaning “citadel,” comes from akros (“upper”) + polis (“city”)—a structure on a high point in the city.
The word polis appears in the names of a few cities today:
- Indianapolis, Indiana, which the ancient Greeks named when they founded this city. (haha)
- Annapolis, Maryland, named in 1694 for then-Princess Anne of Denmark who became Queen Anne.[1]
- Persepolis, Iran, a Greek name for the “city of the Persians.”
- Tripoli, Libya, “three cities,” a name that describes the tri-cities composition of the city.
In ancient Greece, the word polis meant “city,” but it also evolved to mean what today we would call a city-state: a city plus the surrounding areas. It then took on the sense of a body of citizens of such a state. As one page notes, “The body of citizens came to be the most important meaning of the term polis in ancient Greece.” This last sense gave us the words politics and from that, words like police.
Ok, metro. This comes from the Greek meter, meaning “mother”[2]; metropolis is the “mother city.” I don’t know why this was a surprise to me, but it was. In ancient Greece, colonists who ventured out from a city-state (for example, from Athens) referred to their point of origin as the metropolis. Compare “the mother ship” in the vocabulary of sci-fi.[3]
In later ecclesiastical vocabulary, a metropolis was the name for a city that was the seat of a bishopric.[4] The word also came to mean the capital city in general and from there was used to refer to any large city.
The word metropolis and the related term metropolitan evolved into the shortened form metro, but not till the mid-20th century. One exception is that the word Métro has been used as the name for the Paris underground (La Compagnie du chemin de fer métropolitain de Paris) since early in that train’s history.
I was a little surprised at work recently to learn that the word metro is also used in the terminology of internet infrastructure to refer to “a city where a colocation facility is located.” It’s an interesting line, though maybe not a surprising one, from a Greek mother-city to the places that house the internet.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
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[1] Seattle people might be interested in the Queen Anne style of architecture, which gave its name to one of our neighborhoods. [^]
[2] Hence in Greek mythology, the goddess Demeter is the mother of Persephone. Dang, the things I learn from these exercises. [^]
[3] A mother ship is also one that resupplies another ship. I think means that in the popular sea shanty “Soon May the Wellerman Come,” the “Wellerman” refers to a mother ship coming with the goodies. [^]
[4] In the UK, the status of “city” historically referred to population centers that had a cathedral, which was the HQ for a bishop. [^]