Bill’s bushel of apple lore begins with a core of etymology.

Genus: Malus

malus Latin, apple tree < malum Latin, apple < melon Greek,

apple, or any tree fruit < Indo-European root *mel sweet-tasting, like

honey or ripe fruit

Apple < aeppel, aepl Old English. The word apple is related to

Modern German Apfel, Dutch appel, Swedish äpple, and Danish

aeble. Slavic languages add a diminutive to the root to give

Russian yablo-ko, Polish and Czech jablko, and Serb jabuka.

Related Indo-European forms appear in Welsh afal, Gaelic ubhal,

Lithuanian obuolas.

In his seminal word book, Origins, Eric Partridge presents his source of

the European apple word, from the name of a Roman town noted for its

apples and other fruits and nuts, Abella, an ancient marketing

centre for produce from the surrounding fields of fertile

Campania. The Latin poet Virgil called the little town Abella

malifera ‘Abella rich in apples.’ Today it’s Avella, a

few kilometres inland and east of Naples. How

important was this place for fruits and nuts? Well,

the Italian word for hazelnut is avellana ‘of Abella,’ and the botanical name

for the hazelnut tree is Corylus avellana. A rare synonym in English for

hazelnut or filbert is avellan. In heraldry there is a design

called the avellan cross, a stubby crucifix shaped like four stylized

hazelnuts.

Avellan Cross

As for Partridge’s contention that the word apple stems from

the name of the town, it is much more likely that Abella’s

municipal name itself is from an Indo-European root *abel meaning

‘fruit of any tree.’ See my etymology of the word maple.

Canadian Apples

From some of the roughly two dozen true species native to the

northern temperate zone, including the crab apples, have come

the thousands of hybrids and sports that produce modern eating

apples. The process took centuries of selection, grafting and

hybridizing of naturally small-fruited wild species like Malus

sylvestris (Latin, of the forest), Malus pumila (pumilus Latin

adj., dwarf), and Malus prunifolia (Latin, with leaves like a

plum tree). Apple trees shipped from France grew at Annapolis

Royal by 1635. Our earliest settlers used apples principally to

make cider.

The McIntosh Red is Canada ’s most famous apple. Farmer and

apple-breeder John McIntosh immigrated from the Mohawk Valley to

Iroquois in Upper Canada in 1796. By 1811 he was clearing land

at nearby Dundela when he discovered an old orchard. One of the

twenty trees bore very tasty apples. His son Allan McIntosh

grafted stock of the original tree in 1835 and went into the

apple business big-time. The McIntosh trees tolerated varied

soils and climates. Near the site of the original tree, that

died in 1910, is an historical plaque that says the original

McIntosh tree bore apples for ninety years! Once, in England, I

spoke of eating a McIntosh. My listener, a tobacconist in Leeds,

stared at me as though rising damp had risen too far up my

brainstem. In the British Isles, a mackintosh, a mac or a mack is a

rainproof coat, invented by Scottish scientist Charles Macintosh by

laminating two layers of cloth with rubber.

The Fameuse apple , a cultivar based on French stock, is still

grown sporadically in its native Québec. Other once-popular

Québec apples were the pomme-de-neige ‘snow apple,’ pomme

gris(e) ‘grey apple,’ the Bourassa, and the St. Lawrence.

Pomme-de-glace ‘ice apple’ was an early Acadian cultivar.

Two crab apples are native to Canada. The Pacific Crab Apple

grows only in British Columbia. The hard, heavy wood of the crab

apple makes it of little commercial importance. But pioneer

grist mills in the Ontario countryside had gears and blades of

crab apple wood.

Canadian Paring Bee

Early settlers in the Canadas (Upper and Lower) liked to combine

socializing with work. One such neighbourly gathering was the

paring bee, also called apple frolic, paring frolic, and apple

bee. It served the social function of preliminary courting

ritual where young men and women from nearby farms could scout

potential mates, while older married couples could gossip and

exchange local news. Apples were pared, sliced, and hung to dry

on long strings that might be suspended from rafters in the

kitchen, attic, or cold cellar. A staple at Canadian pioneer

tables throughout the winter months was stewed dried apples.

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Canadian Apple Songs

“In the shade of the old apple tree.”

Canadian lyricist Harry Williams wrote the words to this Tin Pan Alley hit

song of 1905. In his Canadian Quotations, editor extraordinaire John

Robert Colombo reports that the lyrics were inspired by one actual apple

tree that grew on Glen Edith Drive in Toronto. Williams was also lyricist of

“It’s a Long Wayto Tipperary,” adopted as the marching song of the British

army in 1914. In the 1970s, George Hamilton IV wrote a country ballad,

“When It’s Apple-Blossom Time in Annapolis Valley.”

Canadian Place Names

• Apple Hill, near the town of Casselman in southeastern Ontario

• Apple River, Nova Scotia

• Apple Tree Landing, former name of Canning, Nova Scotia in the

Annapolis Valley. Annapolis Valley apples enjoyed a long and

bountiful export trade to Britain until the late 1920s.

English Surnames

Apple trees were a method of identifying fields and houses of

founding ancestors, and thus contributed to several English

surnames:

• Apperley ‘clearing with apple trees’

• Applin ‘(among) the apples’ from the Old English dative plural aepplum

• Appleby ‘apple farm’ with Old English by ‘a farmhouse’ then ‘a village,’

with cognates in Swedish and Danish by, all akin to Viking word byr ‘a

farm’

• Appleford from one of several place names describing the shallows of a

river where livestock could cross easily (‘ford the river’) and where apple

trees grew beside the ford

• Applegate ultimately from Old Scandinavian apaldrsgardr

‘apple-orchard’

• Appleton ‘apple farm’ with Old English tun, a common suffix on English

place names. The meaning of tun expanded through history. Its initial

sense was a hedge, a fence, an enclosure, a homestead, then a farm, a

manor, a settlement, a hamlet, and finally a village. Our modern form of

the word is town.

• Applewhite from Applethwaite ‘a clearing with apple trees’ where thwaite

is Old Norse ‘meadow, enclosed land’

• Appleyard a place in the West Riding of Yorkshire and a country synonym

for orchard. Old English geard ‘enclosure’ (pronounced yard) is related to

garden, and an Old Scandinavian cognate garthr gives English “garth,” an

open space within a cloister, yard, garden, or paddock.

Apple Picking at Eragny-sur-Epte, Camille Pissarro, detail, 1888, Dallas Museum of Art

A Jewish Surname like Applebaum

Applebaum is a partial Englishing of the Jewish surname

Apfelbaum ‘apple tree.’ Variant spellings may indicate the

origin of the founder. Among Polish, Hungarian, and Russian

Jews, those speaking western Yiddish, it can be Apelboim or

Appelboym. Eastern Yiddish speakers, like some Lithuanian Jewish

families, may spell it as Apelbeym.

In certain German Jewish families, their surname is traceable

directly to the medieval Frankfurt ghetto called the Judengasse

‘The Street of Jews.’ House numbers and street names were not

common until the end of the eighteenth century, simply because

most ordinary Europeans were illiterate. Houses and shops bore

signs to identify their owners. Among the tree signs identifying

houses and owners, and then developing into Jewish and German

surnames, were Apfelbaum ‘apple tree,’ Birnbaum ‘pear tree,’

Buxbaum ‘box tree,’ Grünbaum ‘green tree,’ and Nussbaum ‘nut

tree.’ These house signs sometimes also served to identify a

shop or place of business. So an Apfelbaum might have sold fruit.

Some Other Surnames

Several Russian last names contain яблоко jabloko ‘apple,’ for example:

Jablokov, Jablockov, Jablockin. The Slavic apple words are of Indo-

European origin. The Russian яблоко jabloko = jablo from Proto-Indo-

European *abel ‘apple’ + -ko a common Slavic diminutive.

Abele ‘apple tree’ is a surname in Latvia. Armenian has a

surname derived from an ancestor’s nickname, occupation, or from

living beside an orchard. This name is sometimes transliterated

as Chendzorian with the familiar Armenian patronymic suffix -ian

prefixed with the Armenian word for apple.

The Golden Apple of Discord in Greek Mythology

According to Greek mythology, a bitchy goddess and an apple

caused the Trojan War. Eris ―her very name meant ‘strife’ in

ancient Greek― was the evil bringer of discord, invoker of nasty

spats during din-din, of squabbles before nighty-night sex, and

so forth. Naturally, Zeus and the other gods didn’t care to

invite Eris to cloud parties, fly-by orgies, unveilings of

statues of Zeus, or Olympian brunches. Eris was a bitch and she

paid the other gods back with nasty tricks. One night a big

wedding feast had excluded Eris, but invited three other

goddesses: Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena. So Eris tossed a golden

apple into the feast hall. On the apple was a little note written by the poison

pen of Eris herself: “For the most beautiful female of all.” The wedding

guests asked Zeus to judge which of the goddesses should win the golden

apple. No way, thought Zeus wisely, especially as one of the contestants,

Hera, was his wife. If Hera didn’t win― hooooo-boy! Never mind, no

heavenly nookie for two weeks. How about no head on hubby! Zeus would

never Hera the end of it.

So Zeus fobbed off the choice on a local princeling, Paris.

Paris was the dim son of the king of Troy. Just then Paris was

doing the shepherd thing in an adjacent ferny dell with a moist

nymph, when suddenly by magic the three contending goddesses

appeared, strongly suggested interrupting the coitus, and

getting on with the judging. Now each of the goddesses was of a

certain age and had no illusions about their beauty, but still,

divinity has its perks. Also they knew Paris was a weakling, a

coward, and chiefly interested in the old ana-kata (Greek

‘up-down’) atop nubile wenches. Therefore the three goddesses

offered him bribes. Hera promised to make Paris lord of the

known world. “Yeah, Yer Altitude, but would that include dancing

girls?” Athena said she’d help Paris, a Trojan, win the Trojan

War and knock those Greeks back into their giant olive jars.

“And maybe throw in a couple of sacred virgins?” But the goddess

of love, Aphrodite, had Paris ’s number. She offered Paris the

fairest woman known to earth. The bad “judgment of Paris ”

awarded the golden apple to Aphrodite. At the time, the most

beautiful woman in the world was Helen, already married to the

Spartan Menelaus. Paris nabbed Helen anyway. And the Trojan War

broke out because all of Menelaus’s Greek allies pledged to help

get Helen back.

The Judgment of Paris, Joachim Wtewael, detail, 1615, National Gallery, London

Too, Too Sexy Biblical Apples

The apple and apple tree are ancient symbols, mentioned in the

Torah, Old Testament, and other ancient religious texts. Now

this is not the fruit in Genesis, not the apple of temptation in

the garden of Eden, a piece of which, folklore says, lodged in

Adam’s throat to give us the English phrase Adam’s apple,

referring to the little swelling in the front of the neck caused

by the projection of the thyroid cartilage of the larynx. No,

the pious took note of the apple and apple tree in Proverbs and,

for example, in the Song of Solomon 2:3-5: “As the apple tree

among the trees of the world, so is my beloved among the sons. I

sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was

sweet to my taste. . . .Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples, for I

am sick with love.”

Red-faced generations of skittish explicators have rushed to convince readers that the Song of Solomon is not what it plainly is: a luscious passage of ancient Hebrew erotic poetry, composed to be chanted at a wedding feast as a celebration of sexual desire and love. Some commentators have insisted that the apple tree here symbolizes the love between God and his people, Israel. Well, read the Song of Solomon for yourself.

The apple tree is a symbol alright, a symbol of a big, healthy, potent

bridegroom, full of seed and ready for his wedding night. Later

Christian writers also blushed to find such piquant sensuality

enshrined in Holy Writ, so Roman Catholic dogma states it’s all

about the love between Christ and the Church. Not to be

outpurged by mere papists, Protestant divines swoon in the deeps

of the Song of Solomon as well, assuring all sex-hating sects

that the poem concerns the love between God and man’s soul. Not

in the apple of my eye.

Biblical apples harbour a few other worms of contention. The

Biblical Hebrew word pronounced ‘tapPU’ach’ in modern

Hebrew and now meaning ‘apple,’ could never have referred to the

fruit of the genus Malus that we know today, made big and juicy

by hybridizers only in the last two hundred years. No species of

the Malus genus grew in the hot places of the ancient Middle

East. Now listen to how the Bible describes its ‘apple’: Joel

1:12 says it was a tree of the field like the vine, fig, and

pomegranate. The Song of Solomon 2:3 and 7:8 says the apple had

a sweet perfume and taste. Other passages say it hung in a tree

that offered much shade.

I don’t want to upset your apple-cart but Biblical scholars

believe the fruit referred to by the word tappuach was an

orange, a quince, or, most likely, an apricot. Ancient

Palestinian folk wisdom said the apricot possessed aphrodisiac

qualities, so its use as a sexual metaphor in the Song of

Solomon is most apt. And apricot trees grew in ancient

Palestine.

The Pome Words

French borrowed not the Latin word for apple, malum, but a word

that meant fruit of any kind, pomum. This gave the French pomme,

and several English terms borrowed from French. Pome is a

botanical name for a kind of fruit like an apple or pear, with a

thick, fleshy outer layer, and an inner core of seed capsules.

James Joyce punned on the word in the title of a little

collection of his poems, Pomes Penyeach (1927).

Pomade

A perfumed ointment for dressing hair, originally containing decocted

apple mush (Yech!), was a pomade. Medieval French had pome d’ambre

‘apple of amber,’ a ball of pleasantly scented substances in a mesh bag used

to keep stored cloths and linens smelling fresh, and, in times of plague,

foolishly carried on the person to ward off infection. This went into Middle

English as a pomander, which could also be an orange or apple studded

with cloves.

In cider and apple-juice making, the pulpy remnant left over after the

pressing of the fruit is pomace, used to make commercial pectin or to feed

cattle and pigs.

Pommel

That torture instrument of the high-school gym class, the

pommel horse, has an apple behind its name. A pommel, from an

assumed diminutive form *pomellum ‘little apple, little knob,’

came to mean the knob on the hilt of a sword, the knob at the

front of a saddle, and then the leather-covered handles on the

top of a pommel horse.

Pomology is the science of growing fruit trees.

The Roman goddess of fruit trees was Pomona who gave her name to

American towns in California, Missouri and North Carolina, among other

states.

Tapestry designed by Edward Burne-Jones and John Henry Dearle, and executed by William Morris, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Quotation

Roman orchardists made offerings to Pomona each spring to ensure

the fertility of their fruit trees. A trace of this folk rite

may linger in the old English custom of wassailing orchards on

Christmas Eve. Hot cakes were put in the boughs of the best

bearing trees, and warm cider was sprinkled on the bare

branches. Then the apple or other trees were toasted. Here is one of the

toasts as reported in Mrs. Grieve’s Modern Herbal:

“Here’s to thee, old apple tree!

Whence thou may’st bud, and whence thou may’st blow,

Hats full! Caps full! Bushel - bushel-bags full!

And my pockets full too! Huzza!”

But perhaps this little carol of peasant greed offended the

apple trees? After all, they had good taste. I like to think a

few of the more refined trees pelted the wassailing twits with

wizened pippins, much like the sportive arboreals that Dorothy

encountered on the yellow brick road to Oz.

© 2007 William Gordon Casselman

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