March 22, 2001

squash

I was cooking a stuffed acorn squash for my wife for dinner when we got into a discussion about the origin of the word squash. Was the vegetable named after the verb? The inside looks like something that's been squashed.

This is one of those cases in which two words, though they sound exactly the same and are spelled exactly the same--called a homonym--have totally different origins. The verb squash is completely European in origin, whereas the squash that you were so kindly preparing for your wife is distinctly American--Native American, in fact. (Hold on, though. There is a bit of a curiosity here. I'll get to that later.) The verb, as we all know, means 'to crush or beat into a pulp'. It first appeared in print in England in 1565 in Thomas Stapleton's translation of Beda's History of the Church of England: "Yea must, I saye, teare them, rent them, and squashe them to peeces." I can't help but wonder what--or whom--Beda was referring to.

Squash comes from the Middle French word esquasser which in turn is from a likely form exquassare in Vulgar Latin. It's probably onomatopoetic in origin. The squash that we eat, on the other hand, is an American Indian word, like succotash. Both words are from the Narragansett language, which is part of the Algonquian group. (Notice the -ash suffix they share.) Squash is from askutasquash, which literally means 'the green things that may be eaten raw'. Its first appearance in print in America was in Roger Williams' A Key into the Language of America, printed in 1643: "Askutasquash, their Vine apples, which the English from them call Squashes, about the bignesse of Apples, of several colours, sweet, light, wholesome, refreshing."

Here's the curiosity: the squash meaning 'to crush' had a noun form once which is now obsolete. It meant 'the unripe pod of a pea'. The OED says it "was also applied contemptuously to persons." Shakespeare uses the noun squash three times. (He does not use the verb.) In A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595), Bottom says to Peasblossom, "I pray you, commend me to Mistress Squash, your / Mother, and to Master Peascod, your father." In Twelfth Night, Malvolio says, "Not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for / A boy; as a squash is before 'tis a peascod." Leontes, in A Winter's Tale, says, of his son, "How like, methought, I was then to this kernel, / This squash, this gentlemen."

So, do we have a connection, even a tenuous one, between the American gourd and the English vegetable? Most likely, says Dr. Ives Goddard, Curator and Head of the Division of Ethnology, Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution. Dr. Goddard is also Linguistic Editor of the Handbook of North American Indians and one the leading authorities on Native American Languages. "I think there was convergence," Dr. Goddard said in an e-mail, "in that the Southern New England word [askutasquash] was not shortened randomly but ended up homophonous with an existing word."

Something like this just makes my day.

Richard