I want to thank Jonathan Silk (comment here) for pushing Popeye to further heights and deeper depths in our understanding of his favorite vegetable. We're not "finiched" with spinach yet.
Now it's getting very interesting and confusing (Armenian is creeping in):
In "Rococo" (7/6/2025), I quoted from Charles Carr's 1965 paper "TWO WORDS IN ART HISTORY II. ROCOCO" his evidence that the word rococo began as way of denigrating certain kinds of out-of-fashion ugliness. Jonathan Smith noted in the comments that "baroque itself was first a(n) (disparaging) epithet", and I quoted the OED's endorsement of that idea, though without going into the whole "an irregular pearl is like a wart" background.
But in a parallel 1965 article, "TWO WORDS IN ART HISTORY I. BAROQUE", Charles Carr lays out three etymological theories about baroque, after sparing us "fantastic etymologies to be found in certain eighteenth-century dictionaries".
Building on observations of Andras Rona-Tas (Tibeto-Mongolica, pp. 213-14), one can observe a basic division in Mongolian words for cultivated plants. They divide into two types: 1) words for grains and grain cultivation; and 2) words for fruits and vegetables.
Words in the first category (tariya "grain" buudai "wheat," arbai "barley," shish "sorghum," am "millet," budaa "grain," anjisu "plow" mill "teerem" etc) are consistent throughout the Mongolic family, and have great time depth — most of them are not obviously loan words from any other language (some have Turkic cognates, but at a considerable time depth).
It seems that paalak goes back to Sanskrit, Monier-Williams gives paalakyaa as "Beta bengalensis" (1st column, middle of the page), but I found that the botanical identiications in MW are often dubious. MW also indicates his source as Car(aka), which looks like it refers to the Ayurvedic text of Caraka Samhita.
Beta bengalensis Roxb. is now idenified with the common beet, Beta vulgarisL., which grows in India and all of temperate Europe, and it is in the same familiy as spinach (Amaranthaceae), and beet leaves are also edible.
Wikipedia saysthat "the ancestor of all current beet cultivars is the sea beet", which then suppliesthis introduction: "The sea beet, Beta vulgaris subsp. maritima (L.) Arcangeli. is an Old World perennial plant with edible leaves, leading to the common name wild spinach." So far so good.
This morning at the Greek stand of the farmers market, I bought spanakopita ("spinach pie") and one other item with the "spanako-" root, which also had spinach as a main ingredient. The resemblance to English "spinach", plus the fact that it was obviously not one of those ubiquitous wrinkled leafy green vegetables related to cabbage, kale, collard, etc., got me interested in what its etymology was.
Just quickly checking a few easily accessible sources, some seemingly contradictory aspects of the common understanding of the etymology of "spinach" started to bother me:
The US president’s taste for gilded decor is often dismissed with comparisons to an ornate European style of the 18th century. But the real Rococo deserves a second look.
When President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, he wasted little time redecorating. The design style of his opulent Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, was ported to the Oval Office: Gilded figurines, plump cherubs and decorative appliques were liberally applied to walls and other surfaces in the presidential workspace.
As with the tariffs and travel bans, the renovations of the second term have been more aggressive than those seen during the first. One term used repeatedly to describe this excess of gilt and glitter is Rococo — an elaborate design style associated with pre-revolutionary France. In the New York Times, Emily Keegin called the new Oval Office a “gilded rococo hellscape,” while Kate Wagner of the blog McMansion Hell dubbed the presidential look “Regional Car Dealership Rococo.” The R word — sometimes uppercased, sometimes not — has also been invoked to describe Trumpian decor in the Washington Post, the LA Times and Vanity Fair.
During my peregrinations in upper midwest USA, I noticed a proliferation of place names beginning with "mi-". Because there are 10,000 big and little glacial lakes up here, I suspected that "mi-" might be a prefix signifying "water"). I had come to Minneapolis to explore the headwaters of the Mississippi in northern Minnesota. That alone was enough of an emphatic prompt to set me off on a linguistic "mi-" quest.
My main intention on this trip is to follow the Mississippi from Lake Itasca, whence it emerges as a small stream about ten feet wide you can walk across on a line of stones in northern Minnesota, to where it debouches into the Gulf in the south. European-American settlers named the Mighty Mississippi after the Ojibwe word ᒥᓯ-ᓰᐱmisi-ziibi ("great river"). (source) Misi zipi is the French rendering of the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe or Algonquin) name for the river. (source)
For English speakers, a mind-boggling letter to the editor on linguistic gender from the Times Literary Supplement (3/9/25):
Masculine and feminine
In Cristina Rivera Garza’s Death Takes Me, reviewed by Lucy Popescu (In Brief, April 18), a character points out that “in Spanish, the word victim, or victima, is always feminine”. This is evidently true, but it would be wrong to draw conclusions regarding any inherently gendered notions of victimhood from this fact; the Spanish word for person (la persona) is also feminine, but it does not therefore follow that persons are essentially female.
I recall that when I began learning Mandarin, one of the things (!) that troubled me greatly was why the word for "thing" was written with the characters for "east" and "west": dōngxi 東西. My classmates came up with all sorts of outlandish, speculative explanations for the supposed etymology. All along, I suspected that the meaning "thing" for the disyllabic word dōngxi 東西 was not derived from the characters used to write it but was the phonetic reflection of a borrowing or the representation of some colloquial, topolectal term.
From Mok Ling:
A friend of mine, Lucy, is in a Mandarin learning group. She told me about the bizarre etymology she was taught for the word dōngxi 東西. Apparently, 東西 being used to mean "thing, item" is based on the conception of the Five Phases (wǔxíng 五行 [VHM: formerly translated as Five Agents or Five Elements, which brings out the correspondences with the Four Elements of Western classical thought, also in the metaphysics of Indian, Tibetan, and other cultures]): East is represented by the element of Wood (木) and West is represented by the element of Metal (金). Objects are made of metal and wood, therefore "east-west" became a shorthand "thing" — obviously pretty ridiculous.
The words that leap to mind are pustakālaya पुस्तकालय (pustak पुस्तक ["book"] + ālaya आलय ["place"]) and granthālaya ग्रन्थालय (granth ग्रंथ ["text"] + ālaya आलय ["place"]). Those are simple and straightforward.
There were several other Sanskrit words for library I used to know, such as vidyākośasamāśraya विद्याकोशसमाश्रय* that included the component vidya ("knowledge"), but they were more subtle and complicated, so they were harder for me to recall.
*knowledge treasury coming together (for support or shelter)
Someone complained in an inappropriate and non sequiturish place that AIO (Artificial Intelligence Overview) did not definitively solve the difficult problem of the seeming non-Sinitic etymology of Japanese waka 若 ("young; youth") that he posed to it.
