An Apple By Any Other Name

Language is a funny thing. We take for granted that words mean what they mean and have always meant what they mean, at least with something as simple as an apple. An Apple is an Apple. A delicious fruit that grows on a tree and when handed to a person, that person will say “this is an apple”. Or, as the basic definition goes “the fruit of the apple tree”.

What if I were to tell you that that was not always the case?

Unsatisfied with the definitions I was finding or was casting around to invent, I turned to my mum’s absolutely enormous Complete Oxford English Dictionary, which is two volumes that are too heavy for my kitchen scales, borderline too heavy for me to lift and require a magnifying glass to read. I hope you appreciate my efforts.

And the results of these labours? An apple is indeed the fruit of the apple tree.

However!

The word itself actually derives from the Old English word ‘æppel’, which is itself derived from proto-Germanic word ‘aplaz’ and in both case the word originally meant ‘a fruit’… any fruit could be called an apple, although it seemed to have been used most often when a fruit (or vegetable) had a vaguely apple-ish shape. As the dictionary says ‘… from the earliest period the word was used with the greatest latitude’.

An Apple of Punic, for example, meant the Pomegranate.

Dates were ‘finger-apples’ in Old English (fingeræppla).

When the fruit was first brought to England, an Apple of Paradise described a banana.  Whether the word made the idea, of the other way around, there arose the belief that the banana might have been the real forbidden fruit on the tree of paradise, rather than the too oft criticised apple as in an apple. The theory for this switch of illicit fruit was developed by 15^th century missionaries, because the seeds inside the banana formed a cross shape (if you slice the banana across its diameter and not along its length).  The cross proved that the banana was clearly the fruit in the Garden of Eden.  The historic timeline of this theory is a bit awry, when the old and new testaments collide … but it does let the apple off the hook, so I’ll let them have this one.

A Cucumber was an earth-apple (eorþæppla). Not to be confused with the real Apple Cucumbers (confusing when Googling the difference).

Wild Tomatoes were known as Apples of Sodom, a fruit which ancient writers believed would dissolve into smoke when plucked… I think the plucked tomatoes might have been overly ripe.

Pomena, the Roman goddess of fruit trees, is named for the sweet apple. The pomme de terre or ‘apple of the earth’ as the potato is called in French?

In the 17^th century people made the collective decision that the Apple, as we know it today, deserved to be recognised as the one and only fruit that it is. Not only that, but they honoured it with the name above of all fruit, because that is what it deserved.