Several of my rye friends have pointed out to me lately that my last two blogs have had to do with food (I use that term loosely), more particularly with Spam and Hormel chili. One even asked was I hungry when I wrote them? So, for these astute friends, I set myself the task of writing about the first healthy food that came to my mind—lettuce. And I made up a poem for them, too:
Lettuce is good,
Lettuce is sweet.
Lettuce is something good to eat!
Well, of course, that set me to thinking about the word lettuce and wondering what its etymology is.
And, wonder of wonders, I discovered that lettuce is related to galaxy and lactose and lactation. Whoa. The common root to all four of these words is lac for “milk.” Whoa. So lettuce is used for lettuce because of the neat allusion to the milky juice of the lettuce plant.
One pearipatetic summer when my husband and I drove to the West coast and back on different routes, staying at every national park we could find, we stopped our old clunker at midnight on a lovely and endlessly unwinding road in Montana and got out and stood in the middle of the dark, deserted road and starred (I mean stared), gobsmacked, up at the immense night sky and looked—until our necks hurt—at the river of light flowing from several thousand of the two to four billion stars of the Milky Way Galaxy. To everyone who’s encountered the Milky Way unencumbered by our man-made lights, it’s easy and wonderful to see how galaxy got its nomenclature and that “Milky Way Galaxy” is a joyfully redundant phrase.
Lactose and lactation are obvious since the root “milk” (lac) is appearent, but when I looked up lactose I learned that it is what makes milk “sweet” (please see poem above) because lactose is “a disaccharide sugar that is present in milk and yields glucose and galactose upon hydrolysis.” (Being addicted to looking up words in Webster’s does have deeply delicious benefits.)
So, this blog is written in praise of the milky sap flowing from the stems of freshly cut lettuce, and it’s written in praise of the sparkling, milky beauty of the Milky Way Galaxy. And it’s written in praise of etymologies and pearonomasia, which, unfortunately, both of my children have known for some time now means “puns.”
Lettuce eat more lettuce and praise more wonders and cucumbers found down here beneath the Milky Way.
Selah.