The Problem With Pumpkin

As a child the word pumpkin seemed weird to me, especially after I learned to read. Pumpkin looked like a mashup of two words, like basketball or sunflower. But that was exactly the problem. The two words pump and kin, though perfectly ordinary words, together they made no sense.

I knew a pump was something I used to put air in the tires of my bicycle and that the action of forcing the air in was called pumping. But I could not see how this information matched up with the gourd fruit. I reasoned that maybe if you pumped it somehow and did it too hard, maybe you could squash it. It was, after all, also called a squash which was another goofy word.

I looked at all the forms of squash in the grocery store. They all looked pretty sturdy to me and I could only imagine smashing a pumpkin with a hammer. But maybe it was a squash because of the goop inside, that stuff you had to scrape out to make a Jack 0’lantern? You could call that mess squishy, I reasoned. And if something is smashed or squash-ed it could become squishy. But this was absolutely not a satisfying answer at all.

And the other word was no better. Kin meant being related in a family, like your uncle. Of course, there was another expression “akin to” which just meant like or similar to something else. What did this tell me? Did it mean the pumpkin was somehow related to pumps? And what kind of pumps? The gadget that pushed air into tires, or a type of shoe? No, no, there wasn’t any solution. Pumpkin was just a weird word.

When I decided to write about this word, I looked into its etymology. It seems the word wandered from Greek to French to land in England. The English over time changed the sound and spelling of the word to suit themselves. This is typical of English speakers.  Historically, they adopt a word from another language or culture and then shape it to appeal to their sense of hearing and ease of speech.

This habit of borrowing words makes English a wonderfully flexible language, but also can lead to confusion like my childhood struggle with pumpkin. However, in this case English speakers in early North America actually adopted the American Indian word for the squash which was and is, lo and behold, pumpkin. This version won out over the inherited strangled version of the French for the same fruit. Yet on first glance, it still looks like you are talking about a fruit which is somehow related to a pump!

#EnglishLanguage #Pumpkin