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Cucurbits

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2004

Orin Hargraves
Orin Hargraves
Affiliation:
Has worked in lexicography and reference publishing since 1991. He has also taught English to Chinese immigrants in the US, lycée students in Morocco, and refugees in London. He lives in Carroll County, Maryland, USA.
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Abstract

The fruits of the plant family Cucurbitaceae – variously called the gourd family, the pumpkin family, the melon family, or the cucumber family – offer rich pickings for charting the distribution of English dialectal variations and the curious ways in which they get fixed. The cucurbits are a medium-sized plant family, with representatives native to both the Old and New Worlds. They are what taxonomists call a monophyletic family, or a clade: all representatives of the family known today have a single ancestor, which presumably sprouted up somewhere on Pangaea. This paper explores this linguistic phenomenon.

Type
Original Article
Information
English Today , Volume 20 , Issue 4 , October 2004 , pp. 50 - 54
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

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