Tracking a Moroccan ghost

Tim Mackintosh-Smith, author of the wonderful Travels with a Tangerine, his debut volume in the footsteps of the 14th-century Moroccan traveller Ibn Battutah, wastes little time in getting going with this remarkable sequel. Give him a word and he’ll be etymologising before you can whip out your OED. And you’ll need one to keep up. Try moxibustion, epizoic, parallactical, aleatory, anastomosing and vaticinal for starters, all beyond this reviewer and, gratifyingly, the (admittedly limited) range of his laptop dictionary. On the second page he muses on the ‘pleasing orbitality’ of food and its terminology.

Thus the praecox, the ‘precocious’ peach of the old Roman, has become by way of a very long Chinese whisper praikokkion, birkok, barquq, al-barquq, albarcoque, albercocca — the modern Roman’s albicocca — the English apricock or apricot, its precocity now attached to the stalk of an Arabic definite article.

Sometimes the precocity is a little too precocious; Mackintosh-Smith cannot be accused of wearing his erudition lightly.