My husband has discovered ‘organic’ dried apricots, which lack the traffic-light glow of their coloured cousins and the concomitant taste of sulphur. He chews them while watching rugby on telly, then complains that he has lost his appetite for dinner.
The apricot seems a fruit straight from the Arabian Nights. One is so used to coming across words that we borrowed from Arabic that there is a tendency to forget that the Arabs borrowed some words from Indo–European languages in the first place. And the apricot first received its name from the Romans.
Apricot is related nominally to dementia praecox, for in Latin the apricot was labelled as a fruit (malum) that ripened early — malum praecocum. Dropping the malum, praecocum was borrowed first by the Greeks of Byzantium, who made it berikokkon. From them the Arabs turned it into al-birquq, and the Spaniards, living cheek by jowl with Arabs in apricot-warm lands, took the word over complete with the definite article al, as albaricoque.
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