Mind your language | 31 December 2005

I shall look upon two vegetables in 2006 very differently from the easy regard in which I held them in 2005. The first is the aubergine.

I had assumed that it owed its name to Arabic, which, only a couple of steps removed from English, it does. The Portuguese took the Arabic word al-badindjan and made it beringela (which is also whence brinjal comes, an Indian English name for the vegetable).