‘Oh, yes,’ said my husband, enthusiastically, ‘a loathsome disease. The tongue goes black and dry.’ He was referring to an historical grouping of symptoms given the name prunella.
If you are thinking it is therefore an unkind name to give a girl, that is because the name also applies to a pretty wild flower related to mint, commonly known as self-heal. Some say it was so called because it cured the disease, but the plant name is older than the disease name.
There is a third meaning of prunella, in the phrase leather and prunella. This phrase used to be deployable to any middle-class readership. George Eliot and Anthony Trollope both used it, in the sense ‘a matter of indifference’. I expect both knew it originated in the poetry of Pope, but that is not quite what he meant.
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