{"id":6254,"date":"2020-07-31T18:19:03","date_gmt":"2020-07-31T18:19:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/?p=6254"},"modified":"2025-04-19T09:22:20","modified_gmt":"2025-04-19T08:22:20","slug":"notes-from-the-editors-desk-in-the-umbrage-of-cumberment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/?p=6254","title":{"rendered":"Notes from the Editor’s Desk: in the Umbrage of Cumberment"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Copyright 2020 Urbanmole<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

One of the pleasures of working with language is the sense of discovery: learning a new word; finding a seldom used meaning of a known word; uncovering an obsolete meaning that hints at a word’s historical provenance. For the intrepid logophile, little beats a good ramble through a leafy journal like the London Review of Books<\/em> for unearthing the occasional nugget. Reading it, I stumble upon cumbrously<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


Neal Ascherson’s ‘Warrior Librarians’ contains the following sentence: ‘\u2026Roosevelt and Donovan created the cumbrously named Interdepartmental Committee for the Acquisition of Foreign Publications (IDC for short)’ (LRB Vol.42 No.13). Cumbrously<\/em>? I know cumbersome<\/em>: unwieldy, awkward, unmanageable according to Chambers. Ah, here’s cumbrous<\/em>: hindering, obstructing, unwieldy, and cumbrously<\/em>, of course, the adverb thereof. And what of the verb to cumber<\/em>? I seldom see that used without a prefix (en-, unen-). And cucumber<\/em>? What’s the etymology of that? Oh, this is interesting: from Latin to the succeeding Romance languages, replacing the Old English eor\u00fe\u00e6ppel<\/em>, earth apple.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


Earth apple? Like the French pomme de terre<\/em>? Yes, indeed. So a cucumber and a potato are both apples of the earth? Then what’s an apple? For Old English speakers it was both what we refer to as an apple today as well as any other kind of fruit. For many centuries apple<\/em> was used as a generic term for any fruit which wasn’t a berry or nut. Thus, for those with a Judeo-Christian religious bent, the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, oft portrayed as an apple, was, indeed, an apple, as plums and pears were apples. Here’s an excerpt from the Old English version of Genesis: \u00c6ppel uns\u01fdlga, de\u00e1\u00fe-be\u00e1mes ofet<\/em>; the unblest apple, fruit of the tree of death. Could have been a peach\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n


Another source has it that the apple<\/em> of Eden is a mistake or pun in the translation of the Latin malum<\/em> (an inflection of malus<\/em>: evil, wicked), rendering it as the Greek loanword m\u0101lum<\/em>: apple. The original Greek word \u03bc\u1fc6\u03bb\u03bf\u03bd<\/em> m\u00ealon<\/em> (or the Doric \u03bc\u1fb6\u03bb\u03bf\u03bd<\/em> m\u00e2lon<\/em>) meant apple or any tree fruit; the word was borrowed again into English to give us our melon<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


Once more unto the peach: malum persicum<\/em> (malum<\/em> again) meaning ‘Persian apple \/ Persian fruit’. A further example that a) apple<\/em> was synonymous with fruit<\/em> and b) the Romans didn’t know that peaches originated in China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


Discovery, learning, rambling: language. Love it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the pleasures of working with language is the sense of discovery. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":6253,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[199],"tags":[204,201,202,203,200],"class_list":{"0":"post-6254","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editorial","8":"tag-ascherson","9":"tag-editing","10":"tag-fruit","11":"tag-logophile","12":"tag-london-review-of-books"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6254"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6254\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54569,"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6254\/revisions\/54569"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}