Pomato

Unlike the other “pom” words listed above and below, pomato has nothing to do with the French word pomme, meaning apple. Rather, a pomato is hybrid potato that resembles a tomato, and thus its name is compounded from the p of potato and the omato of tomato; both the name and the hybrid were invented at the beginning of the twentieth century by Luther Burbank, an American horticulturalist, who apparently never considered calling the plant a totato. Other plant hybrids have also been given names formed by grafting part of one name onto part of another. The ortanique appeared in the 1930s, its name having been compounded partly from the names of the fruits of which it is a hybrid—the or of orange and the tan of tangerine—and partly from the ique of the word unique. Actually, however, the ortanique was hardly unique because the tangelo, a genetic and linguistic hybrid of the tangerine and the pomelo, had been produced thirty years before. The pomelo, incidentally, despite the similarity of its name to pomato, is not a hybrid; it is a species of grapefruit that took its name in the mid nineteenth century from the Latin pomum or French pomme, meaning apple. Other hybrid words have not been limited to the names of new fruits: in 1970 the Van Erode Milling Company patented the spork, an eating utensil combining the prongs of a fork with the bowl of a spoon.


 


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