meta

Meme of a young Keanu Reeves with an astonished look on his face and the words, “Whoah...that’s so meta”

29 October 2021

The English prefix and word meta is from the Greek μετα-. The Greek combining form is from the same Indo-European root as the English mid-. The original sense, as it was used in Mycenaean Greek, was probably “together with,” but in later use, the Greek prefix was also used to express sharing, common action, and change in place, order, or condition.

In English, meta- is often used in the sense of beyond, at a higher level. This sense arises out of misreading of the title of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, a work of ontological philosophy that contemplates such concepts as existence, causation, form, and matter. The title is not Aristotle’s but was assigned the work in the sixth century CE. The book was called Metaphysics because it was believed that Aristotle thought the proper order of instruction should be physics first and ontology second. Therefore, the original sense of metaphysics was “after physics.” But given the subject matter, the title was later interpreted as referring to a higher order, to things that were beyond the physical world, and that is the sense of the term in English.

But in recent usage, meta has come to denote things that are self-referential. In the twentieth century, the disciplines of logic and linguistics started using meta- to refer to underlying principles. For instance, in his 1953 book Linguistic Form, Charles E. Bazell wrote:

Universality of application is only one meta-criterion for the choice of criteria.

The world of computing picked up the prefix meta- in the late 1960s. Of particular note is the coining of metadata, referring to information about the data, such as the date a file was last updated. In 1969, Philip R. Bagley wrote in his Extension of Programming Language Concepts:

A second data element [...] represents data “about” the first data element. This second data element we might term a “metadata element.” Examples of such metadata elements are: an identifier, a domain ‘prescriptor’ [etc.].

And in the 1980s, the self-referential sense generalized and came into its own. In an article in the 5 September 1988 issue of the New Republic, Noam Cohen discussed meta and recorded an accurate prediction as to how it would be used in the future:

[Who Framed Roger Rabbit?] is only cashing in on America’s latest social and pop-intellectual trend: self-reference. You see it in the humor of television’s “Gary Shandling Show,” with its highly self-conscious theme song and star (who’s been known to spy on other characters in the sitcom by looking into video monitors). You see it in intensified coverage of the media by the media; last year marked the first time a Pulitzer Prize was awarded to a journalist whose beat is the press. Above all, you see it in the popularity of a once-obscure prefix, “meta,” which has been called in to describe these activities. Hence: “meta-cartoon,” the only word English has for Roger’s brief animation experiment. According to David Justice, editor for pronunciation and etymology at the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “meta” currently is “the fashionable prefix.” He predicts that, like “retro,”—whose use solely as a prefix, is so, well, retro—“meta” could become independent from other words, as in, “Wow, this sentence is so meta.”

Recently, as of this writing, Facebook announced it was changing its corporate name to Meta. But, like most things Facebook does, it is not the first to do them. Not only is it just the latest in a long line of corporations that changed their names in the midst of scandal, hoping their bad reputation would be left behind with the name, but in 2011, the basketball player formerly known as Ron Artest changed his name to Metta World Peace. He would later change his name again to Metta Sandiford-Artest. Like Facebook, Sandiford-Artest had a reputation for bad behavior—he holds the record for the longest suspension for on-court behavior, 86 games.

But I must note that Sandiford-Artest’s name, while pronounced the same, is not the same word as meta. Metta is a Pali word meaning benevolence, amity.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary Indo-European Roots Appendix, 2020, s.v. me-2.

Cohen, Noam. “Meta-Musings.” The New Republic, 5 September 1988, 17. ProQuest Central.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2001, modified March 2021, s.v. meta-, prefix; modified December 2020, metaphysic, n.1, metaphysics, n.; modified June 2020, s.v. meta, adj., adv., and n.3.

Image credit: memegenerator.net.

shark

A 1569 broadside advertisement for a large specimen of shark that was on display in London in June of that year. An anatomically incorrect drawing of a shark. The text of the broadside is in the entry below.

27 October 2021

The origin of the word shark is a mystery. It was in use by sailors in the fifteenth century and entered into the general vocabulary by the mid sixteenth century, but where and from what language the sailors acquired the word is just not known.

Thomas Beckington, secretary to King Henry VI and Bishop of Bath and Wells, was the first known Englishman to record the word shark. He used it in the 11 July 1442 entry in his journal, which is written in Latin:

In mare contigebat le calm, et circiter horam vijam in sero per æstimationem navem sequebatur piscis vocatus le Shark, qui quidem piscis percutiebatur bis cum uno harpingyren et recessit; quibus vero percussionibus non obstantibus incessanter navem sequebatur; et tunc magister navis cum dicto ferro latera ejus penetravit.

(It happened in a calm sea, and late in the day, at about the seventh hour by estimation, a fish called the shark gave chase to the ship, which indeed was struck twice with one harpoon and it retreated; which truly, notwithstanding the blows, incessantly pursued the ship, until the master of the ship pierced its sides with the said iron.)

Since the definite article le does not exist in classical Latin and given that Beckington was crossing to Bordeaux, one might think the word has a French origin. But le is common in medieval Anglo-Latin. There is nothing here that tells us of the word’s origin, except that the fish was being called that by sailors in 1442. And since sailors on board a ship might come from an assortment of countries, we can’t even draw a conclusion about their nationality or native language.

The Beckington use, however, is an isolated appearance. Shark does not start to be used in print with any frequency until more than a century later, indicating that it was sailor jargon that had not yet penetrated into the general vocabulary.

The next appearance of shark in English is in a broadside advertisement for a large specimen of the fish that was on display in London in June 1559:

The True Discription of this Marueilous Straunge Fishe, whiche was taken on Thursday was sennight, the xvj. day of June, this present month, in the yeare of our Lord God, M.D.lxix.

A declaration of the taking of this straunge Fishe, with the lengthe and bredth, &c.

DOOING you to vnderstande that on Thursdaye, the xyj. daye of this present month of June, in the yeare of our Lord God M.D.lxix. this straunge fishe was taken betweene Callis and Douer, by sertayne English fissher-men whych were a fyshynge for mackrell. And this straunge and merueylous fyshe, folowynge after the scooles of mackrell, came rushinge in to the fisher-mens netts, and brake and tore their nettes marueilouslie, in such sorte, that at the fyrst they weare muche amased therat, and marueiled what it should bee that kept suche a sturr with their netts, for they were verie much harmed by it with breking and spoyling their netts.

And then they, seing and perceiuyng that the netts wold not serue, by reason of the greatnes of this straung fishe, then they with such instruements, ingins, and thinges that they had, made such shift that they tooke this straung fishe. And vppon Fridaye, the morowe after, brought it vpp to Billyngesgate in London, whyche was the xvij. daye of June, and ther it was seene and vewid of manie, which marueiled much at the straungnes of it; for here hath neuer the lyke of it ben seene: and on Saterdaye, being the xviij. daye, sertayne fishe-mongers in New Fishstreat agreeid with them that caught it, for and in consideracion of the harme whych they receiued by spoylinge of ther netts, and for their paines, to haue this straunge ; fishe. And hauinge it, did open it and flaied of the skinn, and saued it hole. And, adiudging the meat of it to be good, broyled a peece and tafted of hit, and it looked whit like veale when it was broiled, and was good and sauerie (though sumwhat straung) in the eating, and then they sold of it that same Saterdaye to suche as would buy of the same, and they themselues did bake of it, and eate it for daintie ; and for the more sertaintie and opening of the truth, the good men of the Castle and the Kinges Head in new Fishstreat did bui a great deale and bakte of it, and this is moste true.

The straunge fishe is in length xvij. foote and iij. foote broad, and in compas about the bodie vj. foote; and is round snowted, short headdid, hauing iij. ranckes of teeth on eyther iawe, maruaylous sharpe and very short, ij. eyes growing neare his shout, and as big as a horses eyes, and his hart as big as an oxes hart, and likewyse his liuer and lightes bige as an oxes; but all the garbidge that was in hys bellie besides would haue gone into a felt hat. Also ix. finns, and ij. of the formost bee iij. quarters of a yeard longe from the body, and a verie big one on the fore parte of his backe, blackish on the backe, and a litle whitishe on the belly, a slender tayle, and had but one bone, and that was a great rydge-bone, runninge a-longe his backe from the head vnto the tayle, and had great force in his tayle when he was in the water. Also it hath v. gills of eache side of the head, shoing white. There is no proper name for it that I knowe, but that sertayne men of Captain Haukinses doth call it a sharke. And it is to bee seene in London, at the Red Lyon in Fletestreete.

Finis, quod C.R.

Imprynted at London, in Fleetstreate, beneathe the Conduit, at the signe of Saint John Euangelist, by Thomas Colwell.

The Oxford English Dictionary, in an older entry, errs in stating the fish was captured and brought back by John Hawkins’s expedition. The broadside clearly states that the shark had been captured by mackerel fishermen that very June. Hawkins’s third voyage had ended several months earlier, in January 1568/69. The only connection to Hawkins is that a sailor from his expedition had identified the fish caught by the mackerel-men as a shark.

This display of the shark was quite famous in its day. In The Tempest (1611), Shakespeare apparently alludes to it and to the exhibition of Indigenous people captured in the Americas and brought back to England for profit. In scene 2.2, Trinculo comes upon the sleeping Caliban and discusses taking him back to London and exhibiting him for money:

What haue we here, a man or a fish? dead or aliue? a fish, hee smels like a fish: a very ancient and fish-like smell: a kinde of, not of the newest poore-John: a strange fish: were I in England now (as I once was) and had but this fish painted; not a holiday-foole there but would giue a peece of siluer: there, would this Monster, make a man: any strange beast there makes a man: when they will not giue a doit to relieue a lame Beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.

The application of shark to predatory humans comes first as a verb. The verb to shark appears in Sir Thomas More, an Elizabethan play. The play is from c.1592, with later revisions. In the past mistakenly attributed to Shakespeare, the play is the product of a collaborative effort. The manuscript is composed by six different hands, and attribution of authorship is contentious. It may, however, been originally composed by Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle, and later, after 1600, revised by Thomas Heywood and Thomas Dekker. The fifth hand is that of a theater scribe who seems to have supervised the revision process but was apparently not a substantial contributor to original text. The sixth hand, contributing a single scene, has tenuously been identified as Shakespeare’s, but if it is his, it’s unclear whether the scene he contributed was to the original text or the revision. The passage with shark, which is not in the scene thought to be by Shakespeare, is as follows:

What had you gott? I’le tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand shoold prevayle,
How ordere shoold be quelld; and by this patterne
Not on of you shoold lyve an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With sealf same hand, sealf resons, and sealf right,
Woold shark on you, and men lyke ravenous fishes
Woold feed on on another.

The use of the noun shark to refer to a predatory human is from the same period and also from the stage. This sense first appears in the dramatis personae of Ben Jonson’s 1600 play The Comicall Satyre of Euery Man Out of his Humour. Jonson uses the phrase thredbare shark to describe a character named Shift:

SHIFT.

A Thredbare Sharke. One that neuer was Soldior, yet liues vpon lendings. His profession is skeldring and odling, his Banke Poules, and his Ware-house Pict-hatch. Takes vp single Testons vpon Oths till dooms day. Fals vnder Executions of three shillings, & enters into fiue groat Bonds. He way-layes the reports of seruices, and cons them without booke, damming himselfe be came new from them, when all the while hee was taking the diet in a bawdie house, or lay pawn'd in his chamber for rent and victuals. Hee is of that admirable and happie Memorie, that hee will salute one for an old acquaintance, that hee neuer saw in his life before. Hee vsurps vpon Cheats, Quarrels, & Robberies, which he neuer did, only to get him a name. His cheef exercises are taking the Whiffe, squiring a Cocatrice, and making priuie searches for Imparters.

The use of the shark to refer to people was also probably influenced by the German Schurke, meaning a cheat or scoundrel. The passage in Sir Thomas More clearly refers to the fish, but this appearance could be a double entendre, combining both the predatory fish and scoundrel meanings.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Beckington, Thomas. “Journal of Thomas Bekynton to Bordeaux, 11 July 1442.” Official Correspondence of Thomas Bekynton, vol. 2 of 2. George Williams, ed. Memorials of the Reign of King Henry VI. London: Longman, et al. 1872, 184. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Oxford, Ashmolean Musuem MS 789.

Dyce, Alexander, ed. Sir Thomas More. Shakespeare Society 23. London: Frederick Shoberl, Jr., 1844, 2.4, 27. HathiTrust Digital Archive. London, British Library, Harley MS 7368.

Jonson, Ben. The Comicall Satyre of Euery Man Out of his Humour. London: Adam Islip for William Holme, 1600. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. shark, n.

Munday, Anthony, et al. Sir Thomas More. John Jowett, ed. Arden Shakespeare. London: Methuen Drama, 2011, 8–29, 189–90, and 415–60.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. shark, n.1, shark, n.2, shark, v.1.

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest, 2.2. Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (First Folio, Brandeis University). London: Isaac Jaggrd and Edward Blount, 1623, 9.

The True Discription of this Marueilous Straunge Fishe. London: Thomas Colwell, 1569. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Image credit: 1569, Thomas Colwell, publisher. Public domain image.

witch / Wicca

Two photos of Starr Maddox that appeared in the Mobile Register on 8 September 1970. The caption run in the paper reads: “BEWITCHING BUNNY—Starr Maddox, 23, a member of a Miami cult known as Wicca, poses (top photo) in her witching outfit with black candles and skull. As a Playboy Club bunny (bottom photo) she displays her 36-24-36½ figure and a portrait of herself done by a warlock.”

28 October 2021

We all know the stereotypical image of a witch, an old woman with a wart on her nose, dressed in black with a conical hat, and riding on a broomstick—think Margaret Hamilton from the Wizard of Oz. But that image is very much a modern creation. Witch, meaning a practitioner of magic, can be traced to the Old English wicca (masculine) and wicce (feminine). Etymologist Anatoly Liberman goes further and traces it to an unattested, proto-Germanic root, *wit-ja, which is related to wise and wisdom. While this extended etymology is plausible, going beyond the Old English record is speculative.

We can see the Old English word in the law code of King Alfred, which dates to c.890:

Ða fæmnan þe gewuniað onfon gealdorcræftigan & scinlæcan & wiccan, ne læt þu ða libban.

(Regarding women who are accustomed to harboring magicians & wizards & witches, do not let them live.)

Liberman cites this as an example of the masculine form, but both wiccan and scinlæcan here can be either masculine or feminine—the accusative plural ending -an is the same for both; galdorcræftigan, however, is masculine. My conclusion is that the gender here is ambiguous and immaterial to the content. The practitioner of magic is to be condemned regardless of their gender. And indeed in early use, witch referred to men as well as women.

We do, however, get a reference to a female witch in one of Ælfric of Eynsham’s sermons from c.1000. Here he is referring to the Witch of Endor (1 Samuel 28:3–25):

Nu segð se wyrdwritere þæt seo wicce sceolde aræran þa of deaþe þone Drihtnes witegan Samuhel gehaten.

(Now the chroniclers [literally “fate-writers”] say that the witch shall call to raise Samuel, the prophet of the Lord, from death.)

In the Middle English period the final consonant became palatized and the final vowel disappeared (i.e., through apocope), and /wɪk-/ became /wɪtʃ/.

Also, in the fifteenth century witch starts becoming exclusively associated with women, and we also start to see use of the word to mean a disagreeable woman. In his poem The Order of Fools, written sometime before 1449, John Lydgate has this to say about one kind of fool, a man who marries an older woman for her money:

A lusty galaunt that weddit an old wicche,
For gret tresour, because his purs is bare;
An hungry huntere þIt handeth hym a bicche,
Nemel of mouth, for to mordre an hare;
Nyht riotours that wil no wareyn spare,
With-oute licence or ony lyberte,
Tyl sodeyn perel brynge hem in þe snare,
A ppreperatyf that they shal neuer the.

(A lusty gallant that weds an old witch
For great treasure because his purse is bare;
A hungry hunter that hands him a bitch,
Quick to bite in order to kill a hare;
Night rioters that will no warren spare,
Without license or any liberty,
Till sudden peril brings them into the snare,
A preparation so that they should never thrive.)

In the medieval period, witches were without question evil and to be condemned. The distinction between good (white) and bad (black) witchcraft starts being made in the seventeenth century, although that is complicated in that all witchcraft, even that used for beneficial purposes, was thought to come from demonic and evil sources.

The present-day religion known as Wicca is a modern creation, not appearing until the latter half of the twentieth century. Its ceremonies and practices are also all modern inventions, despite claims by adherents that the religion is based on ancient, pre-Christian practices. In fact, we know very little detail about medieval or pre-medieval practice of witchcraft. Medieval writing about witchcraft, especially from the early medieval period, is primarily concerned with condemning, and not in detailing its practices, which would be considered sinful in and of itself.

The earliest reference to modern Wicca that I can find is from the Ottawa Citizen of 25 February 1964, which as an article on an English Wiccan, Sybil Leek:

Centuries ago “wicca”—craft of the wise, or witchcraft, was punishable by burning at the stake, and up to 12 years ago witches could be hanged for some offences and imprisoned for less serious crimes. When the English witch laws were repealed, Sybil Leek came into the open and discussed her religion and wrote books describing her life in the forest and her beliefs as a witch.

Note, the etymology given by Ms. Leek is a bit off. In Old English, wicca means witch, not witchcraft, and while the word’s root can be plausibly linked to the concepts of “wise” or “wisdom,” such a link is speculative.

And we have this Associated Press piece about a Wiccan Playboy Club bunny that ran on 8 September 1970 that illustrates both the spirit of the era and the general public’s reaction to Wicca, a reaction where misogyny has turned into sexism:

Starr Maddox is a beautiful Playboy Club bunny who’s on the verge of becoming a first class witch.

A stunning brunette with waist length tresses and spell-binding green eyes, 23-year-old Starr is a member of a Miami cult that practices a brand of witchcraft known as “Wicca”

“Witchcraft is really misunderstood,” said Starr. “Ours isn’t a Satanic religion. We don’t worship Satan...we’re interested in nature and good deeds and things like that.”

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Ælfric. “29. Macarius and the Magicians, Saul and the Witch of Endor.” Homilies of Ælfric: A Supplementary Collection, vol. 2 of 2. John C. Pope, ed. Early English Text Society 260. London: Oxford UP, 1968, 792.

Associated Press. “Miami Playboy Club Bunny Proves Bewitching in More than One Way.” Mobile Register (Alabama), 8 September 1970, 3-C. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Dunn, Sheila (Southam News Service). “Witchcraft Is Not Black Magic England’s No. 1 Witch Explains.” Ottawa Citizen (Ontario), 25 February 1964, 2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Liberman, Anatoly. An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2008, xlvi, 215–24, s.v. witch.

Liebermann, Felix. Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, vol. 1 of 3. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1903, Alfred § 29, 38.

Lydgate, John. “The Order of Fools.” The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, vol. 2 of 2. Henry MacCracken and Merriam Sherwood, eds. Early English Text Society OS 192. London: Oxford UP, 1934, lines 113–20, 453. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 683, fols. 56–60.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. wicch(e, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2021, s.v. witch, n., black witch, n., Wiccan, n. and adj., witch, v.1.; March 2015, modified September 2021, s.v. white witch, n.

Image credit: Unknown photographer, 1970. Associated Press. Fair use of a low-resolution image to illustrate the topic under discussion.

pumpkin spice

A sign for Taco Casa advertising pumpkin spice tacos in College Station, Texas

27 October 2021

Pumpkin spice, or pumpkin pie spice, has no actual pumpkin (cf., pumpkin). It is a mix of common spices—cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, and allspice being a typical combination—that was originally intended for flavoring pumpkin pies. Home-mixed combinations of spices like this probably go back to the first pumpkin pies, but pumpkin spice mix began being marketed as a product in the early twentieth century.

A couple of advertisements from Indiana in the fall of 1931 show two different brands of pumpkin spice mix on the market. The first, manufactured by Kothe, Wells, & Bauer Co. of Indianapolis and sold under the name pumpkin pie spice, appears in an advertisement in the Indianapolis News on 23 October 1931:

This week-end many grocers are offering a special low price on a can of KO-WE-BA Dry-Pack Fancy Pumpkin, and a package of KO-WE-BA Pumpkin Pie Spice.

And a few weeks later, we see a different brand being advertised as just pumpkin spice. From an advertisement in the Muncie Morning Star of 14 November 1931.

Yes, Pumpkins
Are Pumpkins
but the ones grown for Delicious Pumpkin Pies are different. Buy a can of
Delicious Pumpkin
and a package of
T&T
Pumpkin Spice
One can makes 2 large or 3 medium pies

But the pumpkin spice craze, where it seems that every sort of foodstuff is marketed with a pumpkin-spice-flavored variant would not get underway until the twenty-first century. Starbucks first tested its pumpkin spice latte on consumers in Vancouver and Washington, DC in the fall of 2002 and started serving the drink nationwide in 2003. But while Starbucks gets the credit for starting the pumpkin spice craze, it was not the first to sell a pumpkin spice latte. An article in Indiana’s Lafayette Journal and Courier of 6 October 2003 says that a local coffee shop had been selling pumpkin spice lattes since 2000:

As the days are turning colder, and Halloween and Thanksgiving are on the horizon, J.L. Hufford Coffee and Tea Co. offers a seasonal drink for this week’s Local Flavor.

Pumpkin Spice Latte has been offered at the shop for about three years, according to James Pappas, J.L. Hufford Coffee and Tea Co.

This particular recipe used Big Train Spiced Chai mix instead of regular pumpkin pie spice mix.

But it was after Starbucks launched its version of the spiced latte that the pumpkin spice craze became a reality. The Corpus of Historical American English records a 750% jump in the frequency of pumpkin spice between the decades of the 2000s and the 2010s.

Now it is impossible to get away from the stuff.

Discuss this post

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Sources:

Advertisement. Indianapolis News, 23 October 1931, 2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Advertisement. Muncie Morning Star (Indiana), 14 November 1931, 7. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Chou, Jessica. “History of the Pumpkin Spice Latte.” The Daily Meal, 28 October 2013. https://www.thedailymeal.com/news/history-pumpkin-spice-latte/102813

Davies, Mark. The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). Accessed 1 October 2021.

D’Costa Krystal. “The Rise of Pumpkin Spice.” Scientific American, 20 September 2017,

“Local Flavor: Area Chefs Share Their Favorite Recipes.” Lafayette Journal and Courier (Indiana), 6 October 2003, E1.

Image credit: David Wilton, 2018. Licensable under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

pumpkin

Pumpkins displayed for sale on wooden racks

26 October 2021

A pumpkin, as we use the word today, is a North American squash of the genus Cucurbita. The word is almost exclusively applied specifically to the species Cucurbita pepo, but in early use it could be used for any type of gourd or melon, including species not native to North America. Pumpkin is a variation on the older word pompion, which is a borrowing from the French pompon. The French word in turn is from the Latin pepo or pepon, meaning melon, which in turn comes from a Greek root meaning ripe.

The Latin pepo or pepon was transformed into pompon in French probably because pompon already existed in French meaning a top knot or tuft of hair (Cf. the English pompom used by cheerleaders), and the roundness of the vegetable resembled the roundness of the tuft of hair. And in once in English, the diminutive suffix -kin was added in the seventeenth century, giving us the pumpkin variant.

We find the older pompon in several sixteenth century works, all referring to European varieties of melon or gourd. It can be seen in The Grete Herball, a botany text from 1526:

Melons that we call pompous be of two maners. There be some longe and some rounde. But the rounde be of courser substaunce and more gleymy.

And Thomas Elyot, in his 1542 Bibliotheca, states a false belief that eating pompons and other vegetables is a cause of cholera:

That sickenes inge[n]dred with inordinate fedynge of longe tyme, speciallye of rawe fruites and mushroms, moche vse of cucumbers and pompones, and all fruytes very colde, whiche eaten after meales or the meate be digested, are corrupted in the stomake, and ingendreth a venomous iuyce, whiche nature may not susteyne, and therfore she expelleth it with violence.

The earliest known attestation of the pumpkin form is in Nathaniel Ward’s 1647 satirical The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam in America. It appears in a passage about the possibility of King Charles I recruiting Americans to help the Royalist side in the English Civil War:

If he fears any such thing, that he would come over to us, to helpe recruite our pumpkin-blasted braines: we promise to maintain him so long as he lives, if he will promise to live no longer then we maintain him.

The phrase pumpkin-blasted braines is a reference to pumpkins being a dietary staple of early settler-colonists in North America. Some editions of the book use the phrase bewildred braines.

There is a 1648 use referring to pumpkins grown in Maryland. It appears in court records in an interrogatory regarding damages a farmer’s hogs did to another farmer’s crops:

That he neuer heard him the s[ai]d Edw: Hall say, hee would giue him the s[ai]d G. Manners any satisfaction for his corne. But for his pumkin Vines, w[hi]ch then the hogs of the s[ai]d Edward Hall had spoyled, he would satisfy the s[ai]d Manners.

There are also several early uses of pumpkin in European or Asian contexts. One from 1653 refers to gourds or melons grown in what is now Indonesia:

We put into a small Port, called the Boohoole, which we afterwards named the Pumpkin-Bay, because of its fertility in bearing of Pumpkins, for there we bought 500 for a faddam of Blue Bafta Callico, which is Sarrat Cloth; at the same rate also we bought Hogs and brought them to our Boat; being thus victualled we forthwith set Sayle for Bantam, whither the blessing of a favourable wind not long after brought us, though with a miserable Leakey Ship.

And another is from a 1653 English translation of François Pierre de la Varenne’s Le Cuisinier François:

19. Potage of pumpkin with butter.

Take your pumpkin, cut it into peeces, and seeth it with water and salt; after it is sod, straine it, and put it into a pot with an onion sticked with cloaves, fresh butter and peper; stove your bread, and if you will, allay three or foure yolks of eggs; and powre them over it with some broath, then serve.

20. Potage of pumpkin with milke.

Cut it and seeth it as abovesaid, then pass it through a straining panne with some milk, and boile it with butter, seasoned with salt, peper, an onion sticked, and serve with yolks of eggs allayed as abovesaid.

La Varenne’s 1651 French original uses the word citrouille.

The evidence is quite clear; pumpkin is an English variation of a French word with Latin and Greek roots. It originally referred to melons or gourds generally, but over time its meaning has narrowed to refer to the orange, North American gourd that we know and love.

But if one pokes around the internet, one will come across the claim that pumpkin comes from the Wôpanâak (Wampanoag) word pôhpukun, which literally means “grows forth round” and is used to refer to the pumpkin. On its face, this claim is plausible. Many English names of North American plant and animal species come from Indigenous languages. And the Wampanoag originally lived throughout what is now Massachusetts and Rhode Island, an area that was settled by Europeans at about the time pumpkin entered the English language. But an examination of the evidence shows that pôhpukun is a recently reconstructed word, and it is essentially one that is, in part, modeled after the English pumpkin. In short, it is a Wôpanâak borrowing from English rather than the other way around. This pattern of borrowing and modification to match existing roots is common in efforts to reconstruct and revitalize Native American languages. Pôhpukun is a Wôpanâak word; it’s just a recent coinage and not the source of the English pumpkin.

The last first-language speaker of Wôpanâak died in 1899, but there is fair amount of writing in that language dating back to the seventeenth century (Cf. Goddard and Bragdon, and Trumbull). This writing has been published and thoroughly pored over by linguists, and pôhpukun does not appear prior to the Wôpanâak revitalization initiatives that began in the 1990s. Nor does pôhpukun resemble any of the other Algonquian words for melons, gourds, or squashes.

European settler-colonists came in contact with the Wampanoag in 1620. And we have uses of pumpkin to refer to European and Asian squashes from the 1650s. While these come after the first appearance of pumpkin in a North American context, they come too soon for transmission of the word to European and Asian contexts to be plausible. Also, the 1648 use from Maryland, which is well outside the traditional Wampanoag territory, would not likely be from a Wôpanâak root. It is far more likely that the English settler-colonists brought the word pumpkin with them and applied to it to the North American species rather than the other way around.

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Sources:

Browne, William Hand, ed. “Court and Testamentary Business, 1648.” Archives of Maryland, Judicial and Testamentary Business of the Provincial Court, 1637–1650, vol. 4. Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1887, 412.

Elyot, Thomas. Bibliotheca Eliotæ. London: Thomas Berthelet, 1542. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

“Fun With Words.” Wôpanâak Language Revitalization Project, 2021.

Goddard, Ives and Kathleen J. Bragdon. Native Writings in Massachusett, 2 vols. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1988. ACLS Humanities eBook.

The Grete Herball. London: Peter Treveris, 1526, sig. R.ii.r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

La Varenne, François Pierre de. Le Cuisinier Francois. Paris: Pierre David, 1651, 284. BnF Gallica.

———. The French Cook. London: Charles Adams, 1653, 134–35. Early English Books Online (EEBO)

Liberman, Anatoly. Word Origins...and How We Know Them. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005, 33–34.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2007, modified June 2021, s.v. pumpkin, n.; December 2006, modified September 2021, s.v. pompion, n. and adj.

Trumbull, James Hammon. Natick Dictionary. Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 25. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1903. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Ward, Nathaniel (under pseudonym of Theodore de la Guard). The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam in America. London: J.D. and R.I. for Stephen Bowtell, 1647, 66–67. Gale Primary Sources: Sabin Americana.

Woofe, Abraham. The Tyranny of the Dutch Against the English. John Quarles, ed. London: John Crowch and Thomas Wilson, 1653, 51. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Image Credit: Martin Doege, 1997. Used under a GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2.