Potato

When the word potato first appeared in English in the mid sixteenth century, it did not refer to what we now call potatoes—that is, it was not a synonym for spud—but rather denoted what we now call sweet potatoes. The word potato derives via Spanish from the Taino word for the tuber, batata, Taino being a language spoken by the indigenous people of the West Indies. After encountering these people in 1493, Columbus returned to Spain with several “batatas,” which European horticulturalists began to cultivate. About a hundred years later, the other tuber—the white potato or spud—was introduced to England from South America, probably by Sir Francis Drake. This plant, little esteemed at first, became known as the bastard potato or Virginia potato due to its superficial resemblance to the other (sweet) potato. (The white potato was not actually grown in Virginia or anywhere in North America at this time, but because Drake—sailing from Columbia to England—briefly visited Virginia on his way home, the geographical origin of the tuber became muddled.) In time, the white potato became a more important food for Europeans than the sweet potato, so the qualifying adjectives—bastard and Virginia—were dropped from its name; likewise, the adjective sweet had to be added to the name of the other plant to distinguish it from the upstart tuber that was now bore the name potato. The popularity of the white potato also accounts for its many nicknames: later, a shortened form of potato, appeared in the mid eighteenth century; murphy, inspired by a surname belonging to one of the many Irish immigrants who introduced the potato to North Americans, appeared in the early nineteenth century; spud, a word of unknown origin, arose in the nineteenth century; and earth-apple arose in the twentieth century as a direct translation of the French name for the potato, pomme de terre.