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Chew on These Peanut Facts

The peanut is not a nut.

It is the bean of a legume enclosed in a fibrous pod.

A filbert is a nut.

A pecan is a nut.

Dick Cheney is a nut.

So – is peanut an apt common name for the plant? No way.

Ground nut is not much better.

Yes, the peanut is — by a bit of a stretch — a pea

 

Fabaceae - Family Name Origin

But, to repeat, it is not a nut. A peanut is the oval seed enclosed in the fibrous pod of a plant that is a member of the large bean family, whose botanical family name is Fabaceae. You have probably heard of a kind of broad bean called fava. Beans take their family name from that bean. The root is the Latin word faba ‘bean.’ On its way into the English word kitchen, faba passed through Italian and changed its /b/ to /v/, as did many other intervocalic plosives in Latin, to become Italian fava.

Other examples of that sound change common as Latin slowly morphed into its derivative Romance languages like Italian and French? Consider the morphology of the Latin word for ‘oak tree’ robur becoming rovere in Italian.

Fans of Italian cinema will recall that word prominent in the title of Roberto Rossellini’s 1959 film “Il generale della Rovere” where the Italian novelist on whose book the screenplay is based used the surname deliberately and ironically (English translation of the movie title: General Oaks). Vittorio De Sica plays a cheap hood forced by the Nazis to impersonate a leader of the Italian resistance during World War II and ordered to weasel out info after he is planted in a Milan prison full of captured resistance fighters.

English borrowed the robur adjective directly from Latin and so, something strong as an oak is likely to be robust. Intervocalic /b/ in the Latin word for book liber became in French livre.

Just to add an annoying tittle of confusion, fava also is used as the specific epithet of the common broad bean, namely, Vicia faba.

 The etymon or root seen in fava is ancient. Other Indo-European cognates of Latin faba are Old Scadinavian baun, Old English bean and Attic Greek phakos ‘lentil.’  

 

Growth of a Peanut

As the pod (peanut shell) ripens, it goes underground. Its flower is borne above the ground. After the flower withers, the stalk elongates, bends down, and forces the ovary underground. When the seed is mature under the soil, the seed coat changes color from white to a reddish brown. The entire plant, including most of the roots, is removed from the soil during harvesting. When harvested and mature, the beans are roasted to become the peanuts of commerce.

 

Antiquity of Peanut Cultivation

The peanut is native to South America. By the evidence of fossil remains, paleobotanists have determined that the peanut’s domestication must have taken place 8,000 years ago in Argentina or Bolivia or Peru, where the wildest strains of peanuts grow today. Most pre-Columbian cultures depicted peanuts in their art. When the bullying conquistadores of Spain invaded Mesoamerica they found the Aztecs growing peanuts, called in Nahuatl, the Aztec language, tlal-cacahuatl and that’s why the Spanish word for peanut is cacahuate and the French word is cacahuète.

 Other Common Names The most satisfying alternate name for peanut is goober. Black slaves brought that name from Africa, where, in one of the languages of central Africa, namely Kikongo, the word for peanut is nguba.

The peanut had a circuitous path to the American snack table. First, around 1800 C.E., Portuguese merchants took the plant from Brazil to Africa where it became very popular and widely grown in tropical climates. Later the peanut entered the then English colonies of North America as a favourite food of African slaves.

Peanuts are also known as earthnuts, goober peas, pindas, jack nuts, pinders, manila nuts, and monkey nuts; the last of these is often used to mean the entire pod. 

 

Botanical Name Origins

The peanut’s botanical name is descriptive— Arachis hypogaea.

Arachis: Etymology

Arachis was the name, among the ancient Greeks, of some leguminous weed, not the peanut. The precise ancient meaning of arachis is unknown but the components of the word suggest that arachis may have been composed of:

/a/ Greek ‘not’ + rachis Greek ‘spine, backbone’

so that the flower of this ancient weed perhaps appeared to have no central support structure or axis or rib. In 18th-century Botanical Latin, rachis was the part name for the main axis of a leaf or the rib of a frond or leaf. Rachis is still used in botany with this meaning — but we don’t know if the ancient Greeks used it in that sense. Such a derivation is etymologically possible. But it’s just a guess, kiddies — although a well-educated guess — he said humbly.

 

Hypogaea: Etymology

The second part of a formal botanical plant name is termed the specific epithet. The first word in a plant name is the species names, in the case of the peanut, it’s Arachis, explained above. The next part of a botanical name is an adjective describing some feature of the species, usually one that differentiates that species from other species in the same family. A Greek word for adjective is epithetikos. Just as the Latin adjectivus means ‘thrown near’ a noun, so the Greek epithetikos means ‘put close to’ a noun. Thus the name of this second part of the scientific name: specific epithet. In the case of this peanut, its specific epithet is hypogaea. The botanical names of plants are customarily italicized.

The peanut displays the typical flower and leaves of leguminous plants.

 

Short Advisory for the Semi-Literate

Many of us who know words get weary of seeing the word species mangled.

The singular of species is species.

The plural of species is species.

Why?

Because it was a fourth declension Latin noun borrowed directly from Latin, where also the singular and the plural forms are identical: species.

Therefore please do not write sentences like this one from a famous greenhouse website: “Only one specie [sic] of cactus is native to this northern county.” No! “One species of cactus is native . . .” is the correct form.

Specie can mean “in gold coin” and has several other senses, but it is not the singular of species, not even in a Latin phrase like in specie.

Persons who commit the egregrious solecism deprecated in the above paragraph are the same sloppy readers who think Charles Darwin wrote a book entitled “The Origin of the Species.” No such book exists. Darwin’s short title was “The Origin of Species.” He did not discuss only the origin of Homo sapiens but how evolution produces many different species. Darwin discusses speciation.

Now, if I catch any of you uttering either of these vulgar lapses, I shall have to fetch from the classroom cupboard my hickory correcting stick, ¾ of an inch in diameter, the one with the solid iron ferrule.

 

Let us Return to Hypogaea. . .

Hypogaea is the exact Greek counterpart of the Latin-derived adjective subterranean ‘under the ground.’ Hypogaea is Greek for underground, from hypo ‘under’ + gaia Greek ‘earth.’

A rare English adjective is hypogean or hypogaeal from Greek hypo ‘under’ + gaia or ge Greek ‘earth.’

For my lively discussion of many other English words containing the Greek root for earth, click here.

 

Little Peanuts of Trivia

 

 

1. The Peanut Gallery

As one elderly wrinkly who trod the earth when pterodactyls flapped their leathern wings across a sulphur sky, I am old enough to remember an early kiddie show on TV that featured a peanut gallery.

Here is Buffalo Bob with his Peanut Gallery of kiddies on “The Howdy Doody Show.”

“Ever wonder where the term ‘Peanut Gallery’ comes from? The term became popular in the late 19th century and referred to the rear or uppermost seats in a vaudeville theater, which were also the cheapest seats. People seated in such a gallery were able to throw peanuts, a common food at theaters, at those seated below them. It also applied to the first row of seats in a movie or vaudeville theater, for the occupants of those seats could throw peanuts at the live performers on stage or at the cinema screen, showing their displeasure with the performance.”

Of course, good old Buffalo Bob was using peanut because it was an early 20th-century affectionate name for children by their parents. “I love you, little peanut!” Much to the macho horror of young schoolboys, mothers would call out as one set forth in manly manner for school of a morning, “Now, Peanut, careful crossing the road!” Boys would immediately check to see if any of their pals had been within hearing distance of the dread epithet. To be addressed as a “peanut” was a violation of boyish dignity almost as heartless as being forced by your mother to wear your sister's mittens to school because you had lost yours in a snowball fight the previous afternoon.

 

2. Mummified peanuts have been found in Inca burial sites.

 

3. Tom Miller pushed a peanut to the top of Pike's Peak (14,100 feet) using his nose in 4 days, 23 hours, 47 minutes and 3 seconds.

 

4. Dr. Carver

“Dr. George Washington Carver researched and developed more than 300 uses for peanuts in the early 1900s. Dr. Carver is considered The Father of the Peanut Industry because of his extensive research and selfless dedication to promoting peanut production and products.”

Dr. Carver in his laboratory at Tuskegee

 

5. Astronaut Allen B. Sheppard brought a peanut with him to the moon.

 

6. Peanuts are a good source of folate, which reduces the risk of certain birth defects in the brain and spinal cord.

 

 

My Modest Rant:

Peanut Recalls & The American Fetish for Deregulation

Although two presidents of the United States have been peanut farmers, Jimmy Carter and Thomas Jefferson, it was another, later American president who may be partially blamed for the current peanut problem. That intellectual jellybean was Rompin’ Ronnie Reagan who introduced his mania to deregulate every industry in the United States in the famous line from his first inaugural address (1981): “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

It is disputed if that sentence was part of Reagan's delivered speech. But Reagan did say it, for we have videotape of his neocon comment. In any case, soon afterward surged forth a gate-fracturing onrush of manic deregulation, including airline maintenance. “Hey, jerks, airlines don’t have to check planes before they take off.” You'll recall that soon unchecked and unmaintenanced airplanes careened from skies in calamitous, wacky loops like shotgunned eagles.

My view is simple. I’m a businessman. Most of us are. But if one permits most businessmen to operate with no restraint, no regulations, they will poison children, chop up their bodies, and sell them back to their parents as proteinaceous fertilizer under a brand name like Jiffie-Winkies.

In many countries, various government policies neglecting regulation have recently helped to plunge the entire world into one of the most disastrous financial recessions known to monetary history. Lack of non-partisan supervision and no strict overseeing has just caused safety standards at a prominent peanut factory to dwindle down to a deleterious laxity.

Americans, like other human beings, NEED rules and regulations.

The world teems with conscienceless pirates, waiting to fleece the human sheep who go daily to and fro in this world, innocently baaing that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. It is not.

Get wise.

Make rules.

Don’t dummy up.

And don’t dumb down law codes we already possess to nab transgressors, immoral shills and industrial charlatans.

So have a chaw of goobers.

But be careful and insure that their processing, handling and distribution have been checked and that regulators await, ready to pounce like ravening harpies who will sink titanium claws deep into the soft, too frequently massaged flesh of Lexus-driving do-badders.

 

Any comments, emendations, additional word lore?

Please email it to me at

canadiansayings@mountaincable.net

 

 

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