I actually don't have a garden. I had a basil plant once, and it lasted almost a year in my cramped, lightless college apartment before it died. Unfortunately, I do not have a green thumb.
I learned the most fascinating tidbit in my Portuguese class yesterday. My class is called "Survey of Luso-Brazilian Linguistics," and so far we have been exploring the nitty-gritty details of phonetics, phonology, and--most recently--morphology. Our latest venture has been to create these lovely tree charts that plot out the structure of different words, starting with the root of the word.
Long story short, we ended up discussing the roots of different berry words. Allow me to explain.
blueberry=a berry that is blue
blackberry=a berry that is black
But what about strawberry? Raspberry? Boysenberry?
We learned that historically (and continuing into the modern day), farmers would cover their fields in straw so the birds could not see or get to the ripe fruit huddled beneath. And so, the word:
strawberry=a berry picked through straw
We also learned that a rasp is a tool used in woodworking to scrape off layers of wood. Some plants have protective thorns that, when breached, scrape off layers of the picker's skin. And so, the word:
raspberry=a berry with rasp-like thorns
Lastly, we learned that a man named Rudolph Boysen created a hybrid between blackberries and raspberries in the 1920's. The result:
boysenberry=a berry created by a man named Boysen
Cool stuff, yeah?
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