The Avocado and Testicles,Or, Your Cinco de Mayo Party TriviaIt is estimated that almost 20% of the
The Avocado and Testicles,Or, Your Cinco de Mayo Party TriviaIt is estimated that almost 20% of the entire half billion ton production of American avocados will be consumed today on Cinco de Mayo, which makes sense, as few things say (or taste) more like Mexico than this fruit. Cultivated for 12,000 years in Central America, the avocado as we know it is thought to have originated in Puebla, Mexico, though the fossil record shows it as far north as California and as far south as Peru. First use of the word in English goes back to 1696 but didn’t see much use for a century, though the Spanish were using it for two centuries prior to its arrival in English. In Spanish, the word has been linked to the word avocado meaning lawyer or advocate passing through the earlier Spanish word aguacate, but these were probably just homonyms of the Nahuatl (Aztec) word ahuakatl indicating the tree and fruit. It should be noted here that the Nahuatl word had a secondary meaning of testicle, probably because the one resembled the other. Several modern languages keep this homonym confusion with the Spanish word for lawyer-the French call it an avocat, for example, meaning lawyer.Adding to the naming confusion, when Carl Linneaus arrived in the Americas and named everything he could get his hands on, he named the avocado the Persea americana, presumably, again, for its resemblance to something, this time the pear. I suppose we should be grateful that we don’t call them American testicles. Final bit of trivia for tonight: the avocado is technically a berry, and not a vegetable!Image of Avocado courtesy camknows via flickr, used with permission under a Creative Commons 3.0 license. Click on his name to see more work. -- source link
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