Yet it is unlikely that the first element of the name in question was a verb. (The editors of the OED knew the fragola idea and politely rejected it-politely, because scholars of Kluge’s stature have to be treated with deference.) The first element of the English word may have been strew rather than straw, with reference to the propagation by runners Skeat found this explanation not improbable. If we disregard Friedrich Kluge’s idea, which is wilder than wild strawberries, that straw– is related to Latin fragola “strawberry,” we will be left with trying to find out what straw has or had to do with this berry. I am sure heavy thoughts about etymology never bothered Ingmar Bergman, the producer of Smultronstället, known in English as Wild Strawberries ( stället means “the place”).Ībsolutely delicious and no straws attached. Several conjectures about the origin of smultron exist, but none is fully persuasive. The change occurred some time before the beginning of the fifteenth century. Only in that Scandinavian language “earth –berry ” was replaced with the obscure name smultron, a regional word, as it seems. One thing is clear: the Germanic invaders of Great Britain did not bring the word strawberry to their new homeland from the continent.Ī change reminiscent of the one known from the history of English also occurred in Swedish. The word goes back to Old English, and there must have been a serious reason for coining it or for changing the traditional denomination (that is, “ earth-berry,” which did turn up at that time but, judging by the extant texts, was known very little). The double trouble with strawberry is that no other European language has a similar name (one late occurrence in Swedish is of unknown provenance) and that, on the face of it, straw– makes little sense in it. A page from my book Word Origins is also there, and I could (cou’d) have confined myself to a brief reference to Google, but I have something new to say in addition to what appears there and will therefore devote some space to the delicious berry. Boteler (?William Butler) as having said of strawberries, ‘Doubtlesse (sic) God cou’d have made a better berry, but doubtlesse God never did’.”ĭifferent opinions about the etymology of strawberry crowd out one another on the Internet. “In the third edition (1661) of the Compleat Angler (p. Whiting’s book Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases from English Writings Mainly Before 1500: It occurs at the end of the preface to Bartlett J. One fine morning a faithful reader of this blog asked: “What is the origin of the word strawberry?” Before enlarging on this much-discussed moribund topic, I would like to quote another passage. In the spirit of following the precession of equinoxes I’ll provide a two course crocodile dinners: next week, another set of “gleanings” will follow this one. He asked, ‘What does the Crocodile have for dinner?’” “One fine morning in the middle of the Pr ecession (sic) of the Equinoxes this ’satiable Elephant’s Child asked a new fine question that he had never asked before. To entertain our readers and by way of making amends, I’ll quote a sentence from the beginning of Kipling’s “Elephant’s Child”: The text was at once corrected, which made nonsense of the comments, but even with the help of computers, those wonderful machines that allow us to erase the past, one cannot undo what has been done. The first faux pas attracted almost no one’s attention (just one puzzled letter), but the second earned me some well-deserved mockery. To make things worse, while writing about 23 March, I had 23 June (the solstice) in mind and danced around a bonfire three months ahead of time. Wholly overwhelmed by the thought that winter is behind, I forgot to consult the calendar and did not realize that 25 March was the last Wednesday of the month and celebrated the spring equinox instead of providing our readership with the traditional monthly gleanings. One should not be too enthusiastic about anything.
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