
How a Mistake Gave Us the Word 'Cherry' - ohaikbai
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/cherry-history-origin
======
Lerc
Somewhat relatedly, when my daughter was younger she picked off one of the
solidified tendrils that flows down the side of a candle and called it a wack.
Obviously candles are made of wacks.

~~~
b_emery
That is a good one. Here are a few from my 4 yr old:

off-board: as opposite of onboard;

both-turnal: awake in day and night;

sand-boni: Tractor smoothing sand at the beach;

~~~
saghm
I've actually heard "off-board" used by adults in a non-ironic way numerous
times, usually in regards to the procedure taken when someone leaves a company
(i.e. the inverse of "onboarding" a new hire).

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acqq
The article cites Old English: "ciris" as in "cirisbeam" (the ciris tree) and
claims the error from the "Old North French" variant "cherise" but the word is
much older. E.g.

Latin, 1 century AD: Cerasus (AFAIK C is pronounced ch as in chain, Edit:
thanks to danans for the correction: ch is a modern and k as in king the
traditional pronunciation, so it's even closer to the Greek one)

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cerasus](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cerasus)

And even older, ancient Greek:

(pronounced probably like kera-sos):

"κερασός Of Anatolian origin. Compare Akkadian "karšu""

Of course, Akkadian is the oldest Semitic language for which the records
exist, at least 4000 years old, i.e. around 2000 BC. Their empire was in the
part of today's Iraq -- in the area to which the people who later wrote the
Torah (which even later became the part of the Old Testament) referred as "the
garden of Eden."

The cherries are our direct connection to the mythical paradise.

(And, when I'm by Eden and fruits, the famous "forbidden fruit" wasn't an
apple in the original text, that's a wrong, later, interpretation:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_fruit#The_Apple](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_fruit#The_Apple)
)

~~~
danans
> Latin, 1 century AD: Cerasus (AFAIK C is pronounced ch as in chain)

In the 1st century, C was always pronounced as "k". The "ch" borrowed from
Italian was something that was adopted only in the 19th century:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_spelling_and_pronunciati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_spelling_and_pronunciation#Ecclesiastical_pronunciation)

~~~
acqq
One more nice detail: it seems that the German word and pronunciation for
"cherry" somehow turned to have again similarity to the Akkadian "karšu" it's
Kirsche, pronounced like "kirše."

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fred256
Seems similar to how "a napron" turned into "an apron". More examples here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketing)

~~~
greeneggs
The fruit example of rebracketing (which doesn't seem to be on that Wikipedia
list) is "orange". It came from "naranj", but lost the initial 'n' (except in
Spanish, where "una naranja" protects the 'n').

[1] [http://www.bonappetit.com/test-
kitchen/ingredients/article/t...](http://www.bonappetit.com/test-
kitchen/ingredients/article/the-etymology-of-the-orange) [2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_(word)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_\(word\))

~~~
amyjess
I also like how the color was named after the fruit, not the other way around.

(there's a similar example with "escalator" and "escalate"; the latter was
named after the former)

~~~
waqf
Well, of course it is. Who would name a fruit after a colour?

It only seems surprising because the colour is more mentally salient, so
there's a cognitive bias toward assuming it's the original
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic)).

By the way, "pink" is also named after a plant
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_%28flower%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_%28flower%29)).

~~~
Chinjut
Well, some fruits are sort of named after colors. "blueberry", "blackberry",
"Red Delicious", etc. But point taken.

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rudolf0
Now I'd like to know how the French word for "shampoo" (the noun) came to be
"le shampooing".

~~~
vijayp
[http://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/shampooing](http://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/shampooing)

~~~
ComputerGuru
I don't know if you read it (because it's in French) but it basically says
that it comes from shampoo (which comes from the Hindi champoo) but not why it
comes from the gerund shampooing.

I googled for a good half hour and came across that link in my searches, but
no clear consensus on why it stems from the gerund form.

The only thing I can think of is that the original Hindi word is "to
lather/massage" so maybe the French took the English transliteration and
merged it with its Hindi gerund origin to end up with shampooing?

~~~
leereeves
According to the CNRTL link, in 1877 it was used in the same way we would use
the gerund in English, to refer to the action ("signifying the washing of
hair") then in 1890 became the word for the product used in that process
(shampoo) as well.

That seems to happen from time to time in French, when the gerund also becomes
the name of an object involved in the process, as with "le parking".

Sometimes it happens in English too, like "building" and "booking".

~~~
ComputerGuru
Have an upvote, that makes sense.

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aplusbi
Kind of like how the word "pirogi" is plural (a single dumpling is a "pirog"),
but in English multiple pirog are usually referred to as pirogies.

~~~
luck_fenovo
And along the same lines, in Italian a sandwich is a _panino_. In English we
call a specific type of sandwich a panini (or, "a sandwiches").

~~~
toomanybeersies
I recently ordered the Arancino at a local Italian restaurant, and was
confused when I got only 1, then I remembered how Italian plurals work.

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danieltillett
I think I am going to start calling cherries cirisapples to annoy my kids.

~~~
arnarbi
In modern Icelandic they are called "kirsuber" (ciris berries).

~~~
NoWhiteHorse
In modern Danish they are called "kirsebær" (kirsu ber, ciris berries)

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nivla
Similarly the word mango comes from the Malayalam word māṅṅa (pronounced:
"manga"). The European traders mispronounced them into the now known mango.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mango#Etymology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mango#Etymology)

~~~
mixmastamyk
Curiously it's manga in Portuguese I believe.

~~~
brabel
Yes, it is... So it was not the "Europeans" who misspelled the word, it was
the British. The Portuguese were the first to get to that part of the world
from Europe, so they might have brought the word to Europe themselves.

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DonGuero
This wouldn't have happened if William the Conqueror was known as William the
Conquered.

~~~
skookumchuck
If he'd lost he wouldn't be known at all. Nobody remembers who William
conquered.

~~~
uiri
But we do remember the Battle of Hastings.

For those who are curious, the loser in the Battle of Hastings was Harold II
of England (or Harold Godwinson as his father was Godwin, Earl of Wessex).

Interestingly enough, we do remember King Cnut, whose sister married Harold
II's uncle.

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jameshart
The same mistake is in the process of giving us the word 'kudo'.

~~~
scholia
In computing, it also gave us the mip, as in "a one-mip workstation".

MIPS came from millions of instructions per second, so a mip would only be
"millions of instructions per".

In the early 1980s, "a one-mip workstation" was a very expensive thing you
bought from Sun ;-)

~~~
jameshart
Good point. I've also seen people talk about a singular megaflop.

~~~
scholia
Good point ;-)

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Buge
An article about a grammar mistake contains a grammar mistake in the first
sentence:

>unless we start hacking away them.

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iLemming
For a moment I thought it's about git and cherry-picking.

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mixmastamyk
Abogado (lawyer) --> avocado.

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kboukadoum
Pretty neat to look at this wikipedia link
[https://goo.gl/kAR1LW](https://goo.gl/kAR1LW) and see the descent of a ton of
words of English!

~~~
grzm
Please don't post URLs from shorteners as they obscure the destination URL.

~~~
cooper12
They also increase link rot (full urls give you at least some information
like: the domain, date, and title slug) and deteriorate the open nature of the
web by locking a link behind some company's proprietary database that is
liable to disappear without a trace. Please just share the full link next
time, even if it is long.

> URL shorteners may be one of the worst ideas, one of the most backward
> ideas, to come out of the last five years... To someone in the future, it'll
> be like everyone from a certain era of history, say ten years of the 18th
> century, started speaking in a one-time pad of cryptographic pass phrases. -
> Presentation at PDAC 2011 by Jason Scott

