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. Our home in Sweden for these two weeks is in Plommongatan (Plum Street) and all the neighbouring streets are named on a similarly fruity theme: Rose-hip Street, Bearberry Street, Raspberry Street, etc.One should not be too enthusiastic about anything. Lots of berries and fruit end in -on in Swedish: hallon, smultron, plommon, nypon, hjortron, lingon, päron, and on and on… Strawberry and wild strawberry yogurt Ingmar Bergman made a critically acclaimed film called smultronstället (Wild Strawberries), in which the elderly protagonist dreams of fondly remembered scenes of his youth. (Examples taken from the Wikipedia article.) Your personal smultronställe may be a quirky café, a woodland glade or a place with a fine view, far from the madding crowd. Flower meadow at Ribersborg strand, Malmö The literal meaning is “wild strawberry patch”, but the word is used to mean a special place that is close to your heart, that isn’t so easy for others to find, where you feel at ease and at one with the world. A wonderful new word I discovered on this trip to Sweden: smultronställe.
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