{"id":579,"date":"2002-08-20T16:33:56","date_gmt":"2002-08-20T23:33:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2002\/08\/20\/579.html"},"modified":"2002-08-20T16:33:56","modified_gmt":"2002-08-20T23:33:56","slug":"apple-of-my-tomato","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2002\/08\/20\/apple-of-my-tomato\/","title":{"rendered":"Apple of my tomato"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Will Q., who's been providing me with all sorts of cool URLs that I haven't had a chance to post in recent weeks, went off and did the <i>pomme d'amour<\/i> research online that I should've done before posting.  Thanks, Will!<\/p>\n<p>He came up with all sorts of cool pages that I don't have time to read right now, much less summarize and point to.  But I'll relay two items in particular:<\/p>\n<p>A <a href=\"http:\/\/www.forward.com\/issues\/2000\/00.12.22\/arts5.html\">Philologos column<\/a> mentions English naturalist Henry Lyte's 1578 claim that the love apple has \"ragingly amorus\" effects on the eater.  That seems like a plausible enough explanation of the term to me.  (I do think it's interesting that <i>tomato<\/i> has been used as a slang term to refer to an attractive woman, given that the tomato is related to the belladonna plant, since <i>belladonna<\/i> means basically \"beautiful woman.\")<\/p>\n<p>But even more interesting than all that is the mention on that site (as well as another Will mentioned) of the phrase <i>pomo d'oro,<\/i> meaning \"golden apple,\" which mixed with <i>pomo d'amoro<\/i> to become <i>pomidoro.<\/i>  My main association with the term \"golden apple\" is, of course, the golden apple (labeled <i>Kallisti<\/i>) that Eris used to set in motion the events leading to the Trojan War.  Which leads ineluctably to the question:<\/p>\n<p>Might Eris's golden apple have in fact been a love apple, which is to say a tomato?<\/p>\n<p>(This is the second opportunity I've had to use the word <i>ineluctable<\/i> recently.  I'm now tempted to start applying it to various political candidates.  Which perhaps suggests just how silly a mood I seem to be in.)<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Will Q., who&#8217;s been providing me with all sorts of cool URLs that I haven&#8217;t had a chance to post&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}