You didn’t open this article to read my pet peeves, but now I have you: does anyone else hate it when people use the word “vanilla” to describe something boring?
The (delicious, actually!) pods grow from climbing orchids, which can only be pollinated by a tiny species of stingless bee.
Fresh vanilla beans have no smell whatsoever, either. They’re “sweated” and exposed to the sun for 10 days before being placed on trays, graded, and cured for months; vanilla extract is made by drawing the flavour out with booze.
So it shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did to learn that the name itself has a far-from-dull origin.
The word ‘vanilla’ shares a root with ‘vagina’
You read that right ― the flavoursome pods’ name comes from the same root as “vagina.”
According to Merriam-Webster, the word is “borrowed from New Latin, borrowed from Spanish vainilla...the vanilla plant and fruit, diminutive of vaina ‘sheath, pod,’ going back to Latin vāgīna ‘scabbard, sheath.’”
As the dictionary points out, the Latin vāgīna didn’t mean what our modern version does, but it’s a root for both the body part and vanilla.
In their site entry for “vagina,” Merriam-Webster explains that the “Latin vāgīna as an anatomical term does not appear to be earlier than the sixteenth century,” but it had been used as a sexual metaphor as far back as 191 BCE.
Platus’ play Psuedolus included the highly suggestive line, ”…when you were going with him, did the soldier’s sword fit in your scabbard?”
So... does ‘penis’ mean ‘sword’?
If we’re following that logic, maybe penis comes from the Latin (or Greek) word for sword, right?
Well, no. That comes from the Latin word for “tail.”
But there are similar culinary connections for testicles; the Aztec root word of “avocado” was sometimes used euphemistically to mean “testicles,” though experts don’t back the idea that it was definitely named after the pair.
Or should that be pear...