This is the second in a series of blog posts called “What’s in a Name,” by my colleague Richard Pearce. After thoroughly researching, he explains to us how plants received their common and latin names.
Let’s not quibble over words. It will be the same to me whatever name is applied.
— Carl Linnaeus, 1747
In the Midwest the prickly gooseberry, Ribes cynosbati, is the rarer cousin of the more widespread Missouri gooseberry. The branches of both are prickly, but with Ribes cynosbati the fruits are spiny as well.
The shrub blooms in late spring, producing greenish-yellow flowers that dangle on short stalks. By mid to late summer the pollinated flowers develop into berries the size of small grapes but only the culinary varieties of Europe are tasty enough to be used in pies and sauces. Wild gooseberries are edible but bitter and not worth the bother.
So — What’s in this name?
Ribes cynosbati directly translates as dogbrier currant; from ribs, the Danish word for currants, plus the Greek words kynos, dog, and batos, thorns or brier. The association with the dog is fairly straightforward (at least for plant nomenclature): the fruit of R. cynosbati ripen with the Dog Days of summer, those hot weeks of July and August when men and dogs go mad, food spoils, crops dry up, and the Nile floods. (None of this happens today thanks to refrigeration, irrigation, calming pharmaceuticals, and the Aswan High dam. Even the reason for calling this part of the year the Dog Days, namely that the Dog Star, Sirius, could be seen rising with the morning sun in late summer, no longer applies. The Earth’s slow wobble on its axis has shifted the constellations from the time of the ancients so that now Sirius shines at night, in winter.)
In other places and times, R. cynosbati has been known as the dogberry (see for example Manual of the Flora of the Northern States and Canada, Nathaniel Lord Britton, 1907). But today it is almost everywhere in North America referred to as the prickly gooseberry which is both descriptive and succinct but begs the question: how did geese get into the picture?
The word gooseberry does not have an obvious source in biology. Songbirds may eat the fruit, but geese never do. Geese don’t even go near the thorny gooseberry bush. One short-lived suggestion, made at the turn of the 19th century, was that the gooseberry got its name because its fruits were often rendered into a sauce “eaten with young geese” (Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language, 1805). But this explanation, as savory as it might be, was quickly dismissed by the experts.
The celebrated English botanist and etymologist Richard Prior declared the goose-sauce idea “undeserving of any serious attention” (On the popular names of British plants, R. Prior, 1863) while the Victorian popular writer and philologist Cuthbert Bede observed, “I cannot recall an instance where I sat down at an English table, either at Michaelmas or Christmas, or at any other season, to a roast goose that was not supplied with apple sauce” (see ‘Gooseberry’: Notes and Queries, 1887).
The sauce hypothesis was dealt a final blow by the esteemed lexicographer Walter William Skeat who, also in N&Q, wrote: ” I beg leave to thank Cuthbert Bede heartily for the rest of his article, viz., the part in which be deals with the ‘goose-sauce’ legend. His remarks go far towards demolishing it. … it was merely Johnson’s guess, made at a time when guesses were worshipped.”
Without geese in the picture — alive or otherwise — the true origin of gooseberry must be traced to an etymological corruption of an earlier English or foreign word that either looked like or sounded like gooseberry. However, no sooner do we take tentative steps in this direction than the venerable Oxford English Dictionary stops us with the following warning: “The grounds on which plants and fruits have received names associating them with animals are so commonly inexplicable, that the want of appropriateness in the meaning affords no sufficient ground for assuming that the word is an etymological corruption” (OED, 1989). This warning, which must apply to much of the botanical world, is all the more forceful in the present pursuit because it is to be found — of all places — under their entry for gooseberry.
And yet etymological corruption as an explanation for gooseberry is exactly what the leading philologists of the 19th century argued. And argue they did.
Nowhere was the debate of the origin of this word played out more sprightly than in the pages of the journal already mentioned, Notes and Queries (full title: Notes and Queries, a medium of intercommunication for literary men, artists, antiquaries, genealogists, etc.). This English periodical was very much like today’s web blog in that generally concise observations or questions on almost any topic are posted, spawning a series of replies that typically grow in length and/or testiness or become so pedantic that they lose all practical relation to the original question. Here is a “posting” by the aforementioned Walter Skeat to the 1887 N&Q gooseberry thread.
“Is it not rather needless to say all over again what has been said before? Cuthbert Bede entirely ignores my article, which is quite accessible. … the statement is an unsupported fiction, entirely destitute of evidence. … The spelling gosberries, now cited without date, but after 1587, is also entirely worthless; for I have already shown that it was spelt goose-berrie in 1570. … It is thus proved, up to the hilt, that your correspondents prefer to criticize me without having read what I say. The shame is theirs. … To myself it matters little; for my articles will be read long after these carpings have been forgotten.”
Skeat, the author of the compendious An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (1879-1882) was taking umbrage from postings made by two regular contributors to N&Q: Cuthbert Bede, a pseudonymous Victorian writer (actual name Edward Bradley) and St. Swithin (who in reality was Mrs. Eliza Gutch, noted English folklorist). Both had the temerity to question Skeat’s fiat that gooseberry derived from Old French, groise or grose, words that apparently went “unrecorded” but which Skeat assumed existed since their diminutive forms, groisele, groselle, or groiselle, were recorded and, moreover, they were all synonyms for gooseberry.
“I think St. Swithin would have acted more fairly,” wrote Skeat, “if he had consulted my larger dictionary also concerning this difficult word.”
To this Swithin replied (N&Q, 1887): “Inquiring minds consult their Skeat, big or little, before they venture to entertain any opinion whatever as to the etymology of the welcome gooseberry.” Then, referring to Skeat as “the oracle to which I can now draw near” Swithin reasserted his (her) principle objection to Skeat’s tidy gooseberry summation, principally that the word grose was never known to exist.
“I certainly did not for nefarious purpose of my own suppress, nor do I consider that I did suppress, any evidence the author of the Concise Dictionary supplies as to the evolution of gooseberry, via grooseberry, from the “unrecorded” O.F. grose.”
Sprinkled throughout the botanical literature — and confusing the issue further — are references to the modern Latinized names for the gooseberry, Grossularia and Grossulariaceae, as being derived not from the French, but from the early Latin word for a small, unripe fig:
Grossularia (from grossulus, a small fig, from the resemblance of the fruit). (The Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture, 1915 )
Grossulariaceae, n- plu-, (mid-L- grossula, a gooseberry; grossulus, a small unripe fig—from grossus, an unripe fig.) (A Manual of Scientific Terms etc., 1885)
The comparison of the fruit of the gooseberry to an unripe fig seems fair enough. But in his Etymological Dictionary Skeat, dismisses any connection between grossularia and grossus.
“Add, that the F. groseillier was Latinised as grossularia, with a further tendency to confusion with Lat. grossus, thick; so that if the name had been turned into gross-berry, it would not have been surprising….”
Dr. Prior, the English botanist and curator who pooh-poohed Sam Johnson’s goose-sauce theory, also dismissed any connection between gooseberries and figs for the simple and persuasive fact that the cultivated gooseberry was unknown to the ancients (Prior, 1863 ibid). In contrast, Prior notes that edible gooseberries were known to Netherlanders and they even had a name for them: kruisbezie or crossberry. That name Prior suggested, most likely referred to the spines of the gooseberry that form a cross and was the probable source for both the German krauselbeere and French groseille. All seemed well until Skeat denied that kruisbezie derives from the Dutch word for cross.
“Thus, the Mod. Dutch word is kruisbes, or kruisbezie, as if from kruis, a cross. But it is really from Du. kroes, frizzled, as the old spelling shows,” (N&Q, 1887).
At this juncture the reader is free to choose: gooseberry derives from either German or Dutch and is passed to us by way of the French and scientific Latin; the parent words meaning variously crisp, curled, frizzled, or a cross, and — as a stretch — a fig, not one of which has anything whatsoever to do with the goose, sauced or otherwise.
Ultimately, through phonetical corruption of the French, groseille or groselle, gooseberry found its way into the English language sometime before 1570 (The Century Dictionary of the English Language, 1889).
The OED may be justified in its warning that absence of any obvious association between a plant and the animal for which it is supposedly named should not lead us necessarily to conclude that a word corruption must have occurred. However, since the evidence for the latter is so compelling in the case of gooseberry, the OED editors might wish to consider moving their warning to some other plant — the harebell or foxglove, for example, or perhaps even goosegrass.
http://www.prairieworksinc.com/2009/03/17/whats-in-a-name/ What’s in a Name from March 2009 - Monkey Flower
http://www.arrasimages.com/UMW.html Richards Website
