words dubiously unrelated
from time to time, several junior ragbag word sleuths send me the hot lead on words and their etymology—and cutso-paste-o i launch these discoveries into cyberspace to the delight of at least seventeen people.
though it’s great to have a legion of lapdogs do my dirty work while i make turf donuts on my neighbour’s lawn with baronessa alessandra (my bitching pontiac), i *occasionally* have to verify these claims to see if they fit my very loose editorial standards. most do, but here are two pairs of words—billed as wholly unrelated—which are probably not so.
passion fruit & passion
an anonymous tipster wrote in to tell me that our favourite jamba juice ingredient is not related to the feeling that we get in our brains and in our underpants when we watch dr. quinn medicine woman and see jane seymour riding bareback across the colorado countryside. instead, the passion of passion fruit is actually related to mel gibson’s braveheart ii: the passion of the christ. it is true that missionaries believed the fruit bore an uncanny resemblance to the wounds of jesus christ <gross> and called it passion after the narrative of his suffering. however, the passion of jesus and the passion for jane are actually very related etymologically, as passion which originally meant “intense suffering” has come to mean an “intense feeling.”
the cat’s pajamas & cats
someone wrote in to tell me that the idiom, the cat’s pajamas became popular after an 18th century tailor named e.b. katz started sewing silken pajamas for the stars—that the phrase was once katz’ pajamas. well i got news for you pal, wiktionary disagrees:
In the 1920s the word cat was used as a term to describe the unconventional flappers from the jazz era. This was combined with the word pyjamas (a relatively new fashion in the 1920s) to form a phrase used to describe something that is the best at what it does, thus making it highly sought and desirable. Similar phrases that didn’t endure: the eel’s ankle, the elephant’s instep, and the snake’s hip.
even though wiktionary once reported that the sum-total of all human knowledge about the word ambidextrous was “doug k. is a supreme homo,” i am inclined to agree—because there are no citations of the phrase from before the 1920s much less the 1700s—that the cat of cat’s pajamas is related to the andrew lloyd webber musical and not some idiot tailor.
