"I am loving the heat!" Hill wrote from a business trip to Arizona. "It is a little like standing near the open mouth of an oven. I think I could fall in love with the desert very easily. The mountains and catci are amazing!!"
"Take pictures!" I wrote back. "I want to see cacti!" Squinting at the spelling of cacti, because something in me always wants to add an extra i, as in Hawaii or Pompeii, I decided that one i is correct for pluralizing the suffix -us. Then I thought it was odd that cactus is Latinate, when a lot of our American plants, while possessing Latinate scientific names, are colloquially referred to by names of a more American, or at least Anglo-Saxon, origin. "What a weird word," I added. "'Cact.' What kind of root is that? Why is it Latinate? Now I'm going to go look it up."
I sent her the email and, after a quick search on the ever-reliable dictionary.com (specifically the Word Origin & History entry), typed,
"It comes from the Greek -- kaktos (the Latin is cardoon, which sounds nothing like kaktos, but whatever, I'm not Roman) -- for the Spanish artichoke of Sicily (again, why is it Spanish if it originates in Sicily? But whatever, I'm not Greek or Spanish either) which is prickly and apparently some guy named Linnaeus in the 18th century misnomered a group of succulents 'cactus' thinking they were related to the Spanish artichoke but he was wrong."
Then I sat back and laughed for about five minutes.
Poor, misnamed, bastardized cactus and its not-cousin, the not-Spanish Sicilian artichoke.
(Oh, how I heart words.)
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