capsicum

Jalapeño, banana, cayenne pepper, chili, and habanero peppers

31 July 2023

Capsicum is a genus of plants, native to the Americas but now cultivated globally, that produce peppers. The origin of the name is somewhat uncertain, but it is usually said to come from the Latin capsa, meaning case or box, a reference to the seed pod. This etymology was first promulgated by physician Jean Ruel in his 1536 De natura stirpium libri tres:

Nec ab re id esse putauerim, recentioribus Graecis capsicon appellatur, semina in ordinem digesta, quibusdam thecis inuoluentibus, quasi capsis congerantur

(Nor would I have thought this to be the case, for in the modern Greek it is called capsicon, the seeds being arranged in order wrapped in some boxes [thecis], as if they were collected in boxes [capsis].)

But an alternative explanation, one promulgated by botanist Caspard Bauhin in 1596, is that it comes from the Greek κάπτω (kápto), meaning “I bite”:

καψικόν [Kapsikón] Actuario, fortè quod semen comestum mordeat, à κάπτω [kápto] mordeo

(καψικόν in Actuarius, perhaps because the seed once eaten causes a sting, from κάπτω I bite).

But both Ruel and Bauhin were referencing Byzantine physician Joannes Actuarius (c. 1275–c. 1328), who was discussing cardamom. So the name was originally an Old World one applied to the plants of the New World, a not uncommon occurrence.

Capsicum also appears in English in the sixteenth century, again in reference to Old World plants. The earliest English use I know of is from 1559 in a translation of Konrad Gesner’s The Treasure of Euonymus:

I am wont to make an oyll of siedes and the reed codes [i.e., gum, resin] of Capsicum, or Cardamomu[m] Arabicu[m]: other of the codes therof alone, put in oyll, whiche is wont to be vsed in place of oyll of Peper, or also of Euphorbium, if it be put in in more abundance, for it is far more vehement then Peper. With vs (they call it reed Peper, sum of the co[m]mun people call it Siliquastrum, but not ryghtly) but fewe of those silique [i.e., seed pod] or codes do wax rype, bycause of the hasty coold of haruest. But vnrype codes also, ha[n]ged in stoues a few daies and dried, may well be put vnto oyll. For they haue sharpnes inough: whiche is not to be found in the hool pla[n]t besydes, when as the leest heares or stringes are without any taste, and the leeues and stem are vnsauery: but in the codes is so excelle[n]t a tast, that it is worthy to be wondred at. Sum bycause of the vehement heat therof reken it almost emo[n]gst poysons, as Cardan: whiche I prayse not. Nether was theeuer any man said that fyer was venemous, burn it neuer so much: when it hath no venemous qualitie besydes. I haue my self vsed both the siedes of this Capsicum and the codes, without harm in potage but in a small quantitie.

Use of capsicum in reference to the fruit, the peppers, rather than the plant genus dates to the eighteenth century. From Bradley Richard’s 1725 translation of the French Dictionaire Oeconomique:

The Indian Capsicum, tho’ superlatively hot and burning, yet by Art and Mixture is render’d not only safe but very agreeable in our Sallets.

Derived from the genus name is the name for the oil or chemical substance that lends the heat to the peppers, capsicine or capsaicin. This word appears in Togno and Durand’s 1829 Manual of Materia Medica and Pharmacy:

The aromatic odour coincides generally with the hot and pungent taste, and in many cases, it proceeds also from a volatile oil, to the presence of which most aromatic vegetables owe their stimulating property. Mace, balsamic and resinous odours, and some others, have a great analogy to the one just mentioned, and belong also more particularly to the class of excitants. There is however a certain number of these substances which have scarcely any odour, such as capsicum, &c.

And later in the book he writes:

Cayenne pepper contains a peculiar substance discovered by Forchhammer, and called Capsicin by Dr. C. Conwell; a red colouring matter, a small quantity of a matter containing nitrogen, a mucilage and some salts, especially nitrate of potassa. Dr. C. obtains, by means of ether, a liquid of a fine reddish-yellow colour, which he calls ethereal of capsicum, and which is eminently endowed with all the stimulant and acrid properties of the Cayenne pepper.

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Sources:

Bauhin, Caspard. Phytopinax. Basel: Sebastian Henricpetri, 1596, 3.1 155. ProQuest: Early European Books—Collection 5.

Bradley, Richard. Dictionaire Oeconomique. Or, the Family Dictionary, vol. 2 of 2. London: D. Midwinter, 1725,. s.v. sallet. Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Gesner, Konrad. The Treasure of Euonymus. Peter Morwyng, trans. London: John Daie, 1559, 341–42. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Languagehat.com. “Capsicum,” 16 June 2022.

Merriam-Webster.com, 4 July 2023, s.v. capsicum, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. capsicum, n.; third ediction, March 2002, s.v. capsaicin, n.

Ruel, Jean. De natura stirpium libri tres. Paris, Simon de Colines, 1536, 379–80. ProQuest: Early European Books—Collection 8.

Togno, Joseph and E. Durand. A Manual of Materia Medica and Pharmacy. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey, 1829, 22, 180. HathiTrust Digital Archive. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015047255321&view=1up&seq=7

Photo credit: Ryan Bushby, 2006. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license.

einsteinium / fermium

Albert Einstein, c. 1920 (left) and Enrico Fermi, 1940s (right)

28 July 2023

Einsteinium, element 99, and Fermium, element 100, were first identified in December 1952 by Albert Ghiorso and others at the University of California, Berkeley and the Argonne and Los Alamos National Laboratories. They found both elements in the fallout from the Ivy Mike nuclear bomb test of November 1952 on Enewetak Atoll, the first test of a hydrogen bomb. Because of its association with nuclear testing the existence of the elements was classified and not announced until 1955.

The elements are, of course, named for physicists Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi. Ghiorso, et al. wrote of the discovery in the 1 August 1955 issue of Physical Review:

We suggest for the element with the atomic number 99 the name einsteinium (symbol E) after Albert Einstein, and for the element with atomic number 100 the name fermium (symbol Fm), after Enrico Fermi.

The chemical symbol for einsteinium is Es, not E as originally suggested.

Neither element has any practical use other than scientific research.

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Sources:

Ghiorso, A., et al. “New Elements Einsteinium and Fermium, Atomic Numbers 99 and 100.” Physical Review, 99.3, 1 August 1955, 1048–49.

Ghiorso, Albert, “Einsteinium and Fermium,” Chemical and Engineering News, 2003.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 3—Rivalry of the Scientists in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries,” Foundations of Chemistry, 12 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09452-9.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. einsteinium, n., fermium, n.

Photo credits: Einstein: unknown photographer, c. 1920, Wikimedia Commons; Fermi: U.S. Department of Energy, unknown photographer, 1943–49, Wikimedia Commons. Both photos are in the public domain.

cotton

26 July 2023

Besides its usual sense as a noun for the plant and the cloth made from it, cotton is also a verb meaning to get along with, to like. You see it in phrases like take a cotton to. How did the word for the plant acquire this verb sense?

First, the noun, which has a straightforward but atypical etymology. The English word comes from the Old French coton. But unlike most medieval borrowings from French, cotton does not originate in Latin. The French word comes from the Old Italian cotone. which comes from the Arabic قطن  (quṭn or quṭun), an etymology that shows medieval Europe’s connections with the wider world.

As far as English usage goes, the noun cotton appears in a household inventory, written in Anglo-Latin, in the late thirteenth century and was probably in English-language use at that time, but it is not recorded in English-language writing until the early fourteenth century.

The verb to cotton appears in the late fifteenth century, still in the context of cloth and originally meaning to acquire a glossy surface, to take on a nap. We see it in a Scottish royal household account book from 1488:

Item, for v ½ elne blak clath to be viij pare of hos to thaim, price of the elne xv s.; summa iiij li. ij s. vj d.

Item, for xij elne of cotonyt quhit clath to lyne the saim hos, x s. viij d.

(Item, for 5 ½ ells of black cloth be 8 pairs of hose for them, price of an ell 15 shillings; total 4 pounds, 2 shillings, 6 pence.

Item, for 12 ells of cottoned white cloth to line the same hose, 10 shillings, 8 pence.)

By the mid sixteenth century, the verb had taken on a more figurative sense, meaning to be agreeable, prosper, succeed. In early use, it is often in the form this gear cottons as we see it in Thomas Preston’s c.1560 play Cambyses. In this scene, King Cambyses, upon hearing that his brother wished his death in order that he might succeed him, says:

KING
Were he father, as brother mine,
   I swear that he shall die.
To palace mine I will therefore,
   His death for to pursue. [Exit]

AMBIDEXTER
Are ye gone? straightway I will follow you.
How like ye now, my masters? Doth not this gear cotton?

And we see it in the sense of to agree, to be agreeable, to work in harmony in Thomas Drant’s 1567 translation of Horace’s Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry):

So seyneth he, things true and false
   to always mingleth he.
That first with midst, and midst with laste,
   maye cotton, and agree.

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Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2022, s.v. cotton, n.

Dickson, Thomas, ed. Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland (Compota Thesaurariorum Regum Scotorum), vol. 1 of 13. Edinburgh: H.M. General Register, 1877, 164. fol. 70.a. HathiTrust Digital Archive.  

Drant, Thomas. Horace: His Arte of Poetrie, Pistles, and Satyrs Englished (1567). Delmar, New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1972, sig. Av (reprint page 22). Archive.org.

Merriam-Webster, 23 June 2023, s.v. cotton.

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

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

Preston, Thomas. Cambyses (c. 1560). In Hazlitt, W. Carew, ed. A Select Collection of Old English Plays, fourth edition, vol 4. London: Reeves and Turner, 1874, 215. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credit: Kimberly Vardeman, 2011. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

trespass / sin / debt

A sign reading, “No Trespassing.”

24 July 2023

Many people wonder about the word choice in different versions of the Lord’s Prayer. One version, favored by Roman Catholics and Anglicans, uses the phrase forgive us our trespasses. To the modern ear, trespass seems an odd word to use, with its primary present-day sense of entering a property without permission. Another version, favored by Protestants of the Reformed tradition, says forgive us our debts, which may sound even stranger, asking God to forgive one’s financial credit obligations. Many modern biblical translations simply use the word sin instead. Why the difference? It all has to do with translation and the history of these three words.

Trespass comes into English via the Anglo-Norman trespas. The French word originally meant passage or way, from tres- (intensifier) + pas (pace, step), and it is recorded by the early twelfth century. But by the late twelfth century it had acquired the additional meaning of a bypass or way around something, and this sense was extended to include a failure to observe a law by the early thirteenth. And by the mid thirteenth century, the French word had acquired the sense of a transgression of the law, misdeed, or sin.

Middle English borrowed trespas in these legal/theological senses by the late thirteenth century. Perhaps the earliest example we know of is from the life of Thomas Becket in the Early South English Legendary. The relevant lines read:

For it nas neuere lawe ne riȝt : double dom to take
For o trespas, ase ȝe wel wuteth : and sunne it were to make;
And vnwuyrþere þane a lewed Man : holi churche were so:
A lewed Man for o trespas : bote o Iuggement nis i-do.

(For it was never correct law to undertake double jeopardy
For one trespass, as you know well, and it would be a sin to make it so;
And if it were unmerited then for a lay person, then it should be so for the holy clergy.
A lay person for one trespass, only one judgment should they suffer.)

The use of trespass in the text of the Lord’s Prayer is from William Tyndale’s 1525 translation of Matthew. The liturgy of the church maintains this sense, even though the sense has fallen out of common use elsewhere.

Debt also comes from the Anglo-Norman, where the word is dette, and it too dates to the twelfth century. From its earliest known uses, the word could mean either money that is owed or sin, transgression. The French word is from the Latin debitum, meaning money owed, a financial obligation.

English use of debt (spelled without the <b>, as in the Anglo-Norman) is recorded in both the financial and theological senses starting in the thirteenth century. And we see debt being used in the context of the Lord’s Prayer from its earliest known appearances in English. The following lines are from the Ancrene Wisse, a manual for anchoresses:

O þis ilke wise, we beoð alle I prisun her, ant ahen Godd greate deattes of sunne. For-þi we ȝeiȝeð to him i þe Pater Noster, Et dimitte nobis debita nostra. “Lauerd,” we seggeð, “forȝef us ure deattes, alswa as we forȝeoueð ure deatturs.”

(From this likewise, we are all in prison here, and owe God great debts of sin. Therefore, we call out to him in the Pater Noster, Et dimitte nobis debita nostra. “Lord,” we say, “forgive us our debts, just as we forgive our debtors.”

In the sixteenth century, the <b> began to be artificially reintroduced into English spelling to conform to the Latin root.

Sin, on the other hand, has a much longer English pedigree. It comes from the Old English syn, which had much the same meaning as the present-day word. Here is the word being used in the Old English translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, c. 888, a translation that is commonly ascribed to King Alfred the Great:

Ac þæt is swiðe dyslic and swiðe micel syn þæt mon þæs wenan sceole be Gode, oðð eft wenan þæt ænig þing ær him wære oððe betere þonne he oððe him gelic. Ac we sceolon bion geþafan þæt God sie eallra þinga betst.

(But that is very foolish and a very great sin that one should think that about God, or again that anything was prior to him or better than him or like him. But we must acknowledge that God is the best of all things.)

There is a belief that sin comes from some archery term meaning to miss the target. This tale stems from confusion and misunderstanding of preachers giving Sunday sermons. The English word sin has no such etymology. The Greek αμαρτία (amartia or hamartia) does have its roots in hunting or warfare, where it literally means to fall short or miss the mark when shooting an arrow or throwing a spear. But in later use the Greek word would come to mean fault, transgression, failure, or sin. Αμαρτία appears quite often in Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible and, of course, in the New Testament, which was originally written in that language, and as a result the etymology is given in many biblical commentaries and used by preachers as a sermon illustration. This use, however, is somewhat flawed and anachronistic. By the time the New Testament was being written, the hunting sense of αμαρτία was long obsolete. To early Christians αμαρτία would simply have meant a violation of God’s law and would not have conveyed a metaphorical sense of falling short, as an arrow falls short of its target.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 1992, trespas, n.; 2006, dette, n.

Godden, Malcolm and Susan Irvine, eds. The Old English Boethius, vol. 1 of 2. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009, § 34, 320. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 180 (2079), fol. 53r.

Horstmann, Carl, ed. “St. Thomas of Caunterbury.” The Early South English Legendary. Early English Text Society, OS 87. London: N. Trübner, 1887, lines 461–64, 119–20. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud 108.

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1879, s.v. debeo. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Liddell, Henry George and Robert Scott. A Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968, 77. Archive.org.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, trespas, n., dette, n.

Millett, Bella, ed. Ancrene Wisse. Early English Text Society 325. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005, 50. Archive.org. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 402, fol. 34r.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. trespass, n., debt, n.

Photo credit: Djuradj Vujcic, 2008. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

dysprosium

Dysprosium chips

21 July 2023

Dysprosium, atomic number 66 and symbol Dy, is rare-earth metal with a silvery color. It is not found in nature as a free element, existing only in compounds with other elements. It has few practical uses, but it is used in the control rods of nuclear reactors and in some data-storage applications.

The name is a modern Latin coinage, formed from the Greek δυσπρόσιτος (dysprósitos, meaning inaccessible). Dysprosium was first identified and named by Paul Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran in 1886, but it was not successfully isolated until the 1950s. Lecoq de Boisbaudran wrote two notes on his discovery in May 1886. One is titled Sur le Dysprosium (On Dysprosium), and in the other, L’Holmine (ou Terre X de M. Soret) Contient au Moins Deux Radicaux Mètalliques (Holmine [or M. Soret’s “Earth X”] Contains at Least Two Metallic Radicals), he explains the name:

Comme les bandes 640,4 et 536,3 sont surtout celles qui ont servi à M. Soret et à M. Clève pour reconnaître la présence d'un élément nouveau dans l'ancienne erbine, je propose de conserver le nom d'holmium à l'élé- ment producteur de ces bandes et d'appeler dysprosium (symbole Dy)* le métal qui donne les bandes 753 et 451,5.

(As bands 640.4 and 536.3 are above all those which were used by M. Soret and M. Clève to recognize the presence of a new element in the old erbine, I propose to retain the name of holmium for the element producing these bands and to call dysprosium (symbol Dy) the metal which gives the bands 753 and 451.5.)

The footnote gives the Greek root:

* De Δυσπρόσιτος: d’un abord difficile.

(* Of Dysprósitos: inaccessible.)

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Sources:

Lecoq de Boisbaudran, Paul Émile. “L’Holmine (ou Terre X de M. Soret) Contient au Moins Deux Radicaux Mètalliques.” Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires Des Séances de l’Académie des Sciences, 3 May 1886, 1003–1004 at 1004. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

———. “Sur le Dysprosium.” Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires Des Séances de l’Académie des Sciences, 3 May 1886, 1005–1006. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements: Part 2—Turbulent Nineteenth Century,” Foundations of Chemistry, 8 December 2022.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. dysprosium, n.

Photo credit: Materialscientist (anonymous photographer), 2009. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.