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Monday - June 29, 2009

From: Austin, TX
Region: Southwest
Topic: Plant Identification
Title: Fog fruit?
Answered by: Joe Marcus

QUESTION:

In your native plant database listing for Phyla nodiflora one of the common names seems to be misspelled (fog instead of frog). FYI, if wrong, please let me know.

ANSWER:

Thank you for your comment regarding the common name of Phyla nodiflora (turkey tangle fogfruit).

Common names are curious things. While no one would bat an eye about a paper dissecting some arcane point of minutiae regarding Polygonum orientale, it’s difficult to imagine a crotchety old botanist standing before his peers at a professional conference and delivering a serious exposition on “Kiss-me-over-the-garden-gate.” Where botanical names are all about science and rules, common names are about art and whimsy. Botanical names are about the sharing of information; common names are about conversation and pleasant communication. Botanical names are neat and orderly, law-abiding citizens; common names are messy, free-wheeling, teenaged scofflaws.

All of that is a way of saying that “frogfruit” and “fogfruit” are like the old chewing gum ads – they’re “two… two… two mints in one!” OK, Phyla nodiflora is not a mint, it’s in the Verbena family, but both common names are commonly applied to that species and several others related to it. In fact, fogfruit probably even predates frogfruit as a common name by about 100 years (early 1800’s for fogfruit vs. early 1900’s for frogfruit). Most likely, frogfruit arose as a common name from a mispronunciation or misspelling of fogfruit. I have in my mind the scene of a copy editor looking at “fogfruit” and saying, “That can’t be right! What the heck is a fogfruit? It must be, oh, I don’t know, maybe frogfruit! Yep, that must be it. Frogfruit makes a lot more sense! Set the type, boys!” Even today, if you do a Google search for each common name, you’ll get more “hits” for fogfruit than you will for frogfruit. Neither common name makes much sense to me and I’m still looking for a good (non-fanciful) explanation for the origin of either one. My personal preference is for the common name, Turkey-tangle, but that’s another issue altogether.