Borage Borage is an annual herb with drooping blue, white, or pink flowers, often therefore planted up on a slope, so the starry flowers are more easily seen. Borage is a prolific self-seeder, and will appear year after year in the same patch. Learn more about this plant's name at the bottom of this page. Fascinating Origin of the Word Borage The English form of the herb’s name evolved like this: borage < bourrache Old French < borago Botanical Latin < borrago Medieval Latin < abu ‘araq Arabic ‘father of sweat,’ ‘father of moisture,’ so named because early Arabic medicine used borage as a sudorific or diaphoretic, an agent that induces sweating.
Bourassa: Origin of the Surname A long prominent Québec family takes its name from this cloth. One who made and sold bourre de laine had the French occupational surname of bourrassier. Bourassa is a regional variant, and the surname of Henri Bourassa (1868-1952), founder in 1910 of Le Devoir, one of Canada ’s most influential newspapers. Henri Bourassa was an important Québec politician who advanced French-Canadian nationalism. He was the grandson of Papineau. Robert Bourassa was Premier of Québec (1970-1976 and 1985-1994) and helped draft the Meech Lake Accord and supported the Free Trade Agreement.
Burro Bourre or bure came into Old French from the street Latin of the Romans who conquered ancient Gaul. There burra meant ‘rough wool’ or ‘a shaggy garment.’ Burrus was an old Latin adjective for brownish-red, the colour of such clothing and of the dye obtained from borage roots. Boraginaceae, the borage family of plants, is a small group of European and Asian herbs grown for Burrito The Pyre is Fiery Red Latin burrus was borrowed from or was akin to the Greek colour adjective pyrros ‘fiery red’ whose root is pyr, which is cognate with the English word fire. Compare these English words derived from the Greek word for fire: pyre, Pyrex™, and pyromaniac.
Species: Borago officinalis Borago officinalis is the botanical name of the annual herb. Officinalis is an interesting medieval Latin adjective seen as the specific name of many older botanical plants that were sold in shops because they had medicinal and cosmetic uses. Officina is the medieval Latin word for a workshop or shop, from which English gets of course office. Officina is a contraction of opificina from opifex ‘craftsman, mechanic’ which in turn is made up of opus, Latin ‘work’ + fex, ficis Latin noun and adj. suffix ‘doing, making.’ Compare facere Latin ‘to do, to make.’ Officinalis as a specific in a plant name almost always indicates the plant was widely used in medieval times and often centuries before for some human purpose. Borage was often added as a flavouring to tankards of wine and cider. The ancients believed borage essence drove away melancholy and gladdened the heart. Medieval students had the notion that a few young leaves of borage in their dinner wine would cheer them on to further study, perhaps study of the very roots that connect Bourassa, borage, burrito, and burro.
© 2007 William Gordon Casselman
I invite you to tour my site and select from the hundreds of word stories here. To begin, click on the Word List banner below. Then perhaps browse the site map with its links to every page of my website.
More fascinating word origins await the reader of Canadian Words & Sayings. Click the cover below to sample it. This book is in print and available to order at any book store in the world.
published by McArthur & Company, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
....................................................................
The Vocabula Review is one of the best current online journals about language. I'm a columnist there and hope you will visit Vocabula online. Do so by clicking on the logo provided above or below. There is a modest annual subscription fee for reading the linguistic probings and jeux d'espirit of some of North America's best writers on language (he said with all due lack of humility). But you may taste an enticing free sample of Vocabula content by visiting the website www.vocabula.com or by clicking the top or bottom logo.
...................................................................
Books to Sample / Humour / The Wording Room / Q&A /Biography / New / Schedule /BUY BOOKS ONLINE / Submit Sayings / Photos / Contact / Links / Site Map
|
The mature plant is covered with stiff, prickly hairs. Consequently only the young leaves that taste pleasantly of cucumber are used to flavour salads, summer punches and cocktails like Pimm’s Cup. Blue borage flowers add a peppery brio to fresh salad. The rough, woolly hairs of borage may account for a second possible origin of the medieval Latin word, namely in the Old French bure, bourre, and bourre de laine ‘homespun cloth of brown wool.’ It was the prickly material from which monks’ robes were made, the same monks who would have collected borage in the wild and grown it in their herb gardens.
thousands of years to obtain this good red dye. Incidentally, that brownish-red or reddish-brown was also the colour of a small donkey used as a pack animal, and Roman soldiers posted to the Iberian peninsula called the animal burrus, thus planting the verbal seed for one of the earliest words in the Spanish language, burro. 
In Mexico, a tortilla wrapped around a filling of spiced beef and other yummies looked to eaters like a little donkey loaded down with a colourful pack, and so the diminutive form burrito meaning ‘little donkey’ came to be applied to the food as well. 
