… or getting it out of my system, possibly.
I was just sliding some comments on Fúnmi Olúbọ̀dé-Sàwẹ̀’s ‘Strategies of Composition in Yoruba Plant Nomenclature’ into my dissertation, so of course I had to skim through it again. It’s impossible to avoid noticing that Yoruba plant-names give the impression that their inventors were interested in comparative penisology. Olúbọ̀dé-Sàwẹ̀’s explanation of why this isn’t obscene is that:
…animals, not being part of human society, are not thought of as possessing modesty….
Olúbọ̀dé-Sàwẹ̀, Fúnmi. “Strategies of Composition in Yoruba Plant Nomenclature.” In Issues in Contemporary African Linguistics: A Festschrift for Oladele Awobuluyi, edited by Ozo-mekuri Ndimele and Lendzemo Constantine Yuka, 237-57: M & J Grand Orbit Communications, 2016. 253.
Fair enough, fair enough… I only mention this anyway because I just found out the word ‘orchid’ is derived from the Greek for testicles. Orchids were once called ‘bollockworts’ in English, Needless to say, Europeans are no strangers to vulgarity either. I could talk here about the toponyms of some places I have lived in, but the line must be drawn somewhere. The bollockwort is named according to the practice of picking the part of the human anatomy the plant (allegedly) most closely resembles and adding the suffix ‘wort’. I expect the Doctrine of Signatures probably got involved somewhere along the way, in which case, the mind boggles.
‘Wort’ is a nice straightforward word, being Old English for ‘plant’ (probably, I suspect, for herbaceous plants specifically, and maybe mostly medical ones). Unfortunately it acquires resonances from being a homophone of ‘wart’. The two were originally quite different:
- Now – wort / wart
- Old English – wyrt / wearte
- Germanic – wurtiz / warze
At this point, I naturally wondered what the various African languages in my area of study make of orchids. Unfortunately, my researches are currently limited to Irvine’s ‘Plants of the Gold Coast‘, which I happened to have out of the library when the pandemic started. I was not really surprised to find very few orchids with local names. I seem to recall reading that they are mostly the epiphytic type and confined to limited ranges. The only one for which Irvine gives an African name is Vanilla crenulata. It’s called Sankuban in Twi, probably after the Sanku (or Seperewa), an instrument for which its aerial roots provide (provided?) strings. That led me to Osei Korankye’s Emmere Nhyina Nse, which is now my favourite listening. From the ridiculous to the sublime. Who said rabbit-holes were unproductive?