A friend of mine is sick and asked me to do some shopping for her.
One of the items on the list was zucchini. So I bought some of this:
I know this as brinjal, or eggplant, but also that it has other names.
It turns out, she actually wanted this:
This I know as baby marrow, or courgette, but also that it has other names.
Clearly I knew zucchini was one of those “other names”, but I applied it to the wrong item. Looking into it more, it seems baby marrow is a South African term, which doesn’t appear to be used elsewhere in the world. Courgette is British English. And zucchini is an American word, also used in Australia.
So I feel somewhat vindicated.
Similarly, brinjal is South African English, aubergine is British English, and eggplant the American English.
I was curious why the American eggplant ranked above the British aubergine in my awareness. It turns out that the Afrikaans name is ‘eiervrug’, literally ‘egg fruit’ (yes, it actually is a fruit, not a vegetable). But I had to look that up, and it seemed an unlikely vector. The rather more likely reason is the ubiquity of the eggplant emoji, used for suggestive texting.
In a parallel world, people would have been creative enough to find a suggestive use for a zucchini emoji, and none of this would have happened.
Images from Wikimedia Commons, 1, 2 and 3.
