ZINNIA

　　A plant, with striking, highly colored, but rather coarse blooms. Native toMexico and the Southwest, but for some reason adopted as the state flower of Indiana. The name zinnia comes from that of J.G.Zinn, an obscure 18th-century German botanist who seems to have no other claim to fame than this.

　　5. Word Stories About Your Dining Table

　　BREAD: merely a fragment

　　If you had gone into an English bakery around 700 A.D. and had asked for a loaf then meant bread, and their word bread meant “a little piece,” “a fragment.” So when you spoke of a loaf of bread, the clerk would have understood you to have said “a bread of fragments,” than which nothing could have sounded sillier. Finally, however, bread came to mean “a piece of bread;” later “broken bread;” and in the end bread and loaf took on their present meanings.

　　CANDY: broken bits

　　Until quite recent times we said, not just candy but sugar candy, and the derivation of these words indicates that our confection must have always been on the hard side for candy is ultimately from the Sanskrit khanda which meant a piece of something, or lump sugar. These two words sarkara khanda are represented in Italian to form zucchero candi, our familiar sugar candy.

　　CAROUSE: bottoms up

　　Sometimes a party that starts innocently and pleasantly will end in a wild carouse. When we pronounce this word carouse, we are coming as near as we can to saying gar aus which is the German word for “completely finished.” When a celebrant is drinking in a tavern and his glass is gar aus, or “completely finished,” it is empty, and if it is gar aus too often he is starting to carouse. And when we drink we are usually hob-nobbing with other people, that is, we are chatting socially and being convivial. But in the 12th century when the English cried habban-nabban they were saying “have”-- “have not,” which was a sort of take or leave it invitation to a drink.

　　CEREAL: named for a goddess

　　When you are eating your morning cereal, you are paying a small tribute to an ancient goddess. In 496 B.C. the Roman countryside was cursed by a terrible drouth. The priests of the day turned to the Sibylline oracle for help. As a result of this divine consultation. The priests reported that a new goddess, Ceres, must be adopted, and they recommended that immediate sacrifices be made to her so that she would bring rain to the land. In the end, Ceres became the protector of the crops. The caretakers of her temple were the overseers of the grain market, which, however, the goddess controlled since it was her influence that determined the harvest, and to insure a good harvest the first cuttings of the corn were always sacrificed to her. The Latin adjective cerealis, which meant “of Ceres,” gave us our word cereal.

　　CHARTREUSE: from a monastery’s name

　　The name derives from La Grande Chartreuse, an old Carthusian monastery, where this cordial was originally made. In the early 17th century the Marechal d’Estréss gave the monks a recipe for the liqueur which consisted of fine herbs and brandy. But in 1880 the Order was expelled from France and they set up their distillery in Spain at Terragona. Connoisseurs claim that the cordial is not right now because the herbs are gathered in an alien spot. It is reported that the monks are using legal action to get back to their original spot so that the cognoscenti can have their chartreuse with the right flavor.

　　CHOWDER: named after a pot

　　In the little villages of Brittany, on the north coast of France, it has long been the custom for each fisherman to toss a bit of his catch into a common mess of fish and biscuit that cooks in a community pot or chaudière. This dish was so good that its fame spread to Newfoundland and so to the east coast of the United States, and the name of the pot was soon applied to the contents, and the spelling chaudière was restyled as chowder.