Word Junkie: Mendocino County’s autumn edition

In Boonville, the county fair puts apples right in its name. It’s the Mendocino County Fair and Apple Show.

Most of the season’s words came a long way to get here. A few never left Anderson Valley.

Fall, the word Americans kept

Fall is short for “fall of the leaf,” a phrase English speakers were using in the 1540s. By the 1660s, fall alone meant the season. England used it for a while, then let it go. Americans didn’t.

Autumn is the older name, in English since the late 1300s, by way of French from the Latin autumnus. Where the Romans got autumnus, nobody knows. Etruscan, maybe.

Gossamer, the goose’s summer

Gossamer shows up around 1300 as the name for the filmy spider silk found in stubble fields late in the fall. It appears to be built from two old words, goose and summer. The best guess is that “goose summer” first meant a warm spell late in the year, when geese might be flying overhead, and the name drifted over to the silk that people noticed around the same time and often in the same fields. Swedish calls the same silk “summer thread.”

It still catches the light on sunny fall afternoons.

Acorn, which owes nothing to oaks or corn

Acorn is spelled as if it came from oak and corn. People started writing it that way in the 1400s and 1500s, but neither word has anything to do with it. The Old English word was æcern, the nuts of any forest tree. Most sources tie it to æcer, open land, the word that became acre.

Mast is the old word for what falls: nuts and acorns that feed animals in the woods. In Old English, mæst meant forest food, especially for pigs.

Windfall, free to anyone

In the 1400s, a windfall was wood or fruit the wind brought down, which made it free to all. By the 1540s, the word meant any unexpected gain. Apples that the wind knocks down in an Anderson Valley orchard are still windfalls in the oldest sense.

Pomace and cider, the leftovers and the drink

Press apples or grapes and you’re left with skins, pulp, seeds and stems. That’s pomace. In Mendocino County, fall is when apples and grapes both go through the press. The word comes from Latin pomum, fruit or apple, the same word behind Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit trees.

Cider took the long way. It traces back through French and Latin to the Hebrew shekhar, a word for any strong drink. English narrowed it down to apples.

A Boonville interruption: Boontling

The Anderson Valley Historical Society says Boontling started with the women and children working the hop fields outside Boonville, around the turn of the last century. From there it spread through the valley. Boonville is Boont. Philo is Poleeko.

A large fire is a jeffer, after a Boonter named Jeff who built large fires in his fireplace. Coffee is zeese. A cook at a hunting camp went by Zeese, from his initials, Z.C., and he made his coffee bitterly strong. A drink is a horn, so a cup of coffee is a horn of zeese. Good is bahl. Wine is frattey.

And in Boonville, an apple head is a girlfriend. The Apple Show is about the other kind.

The bottom line, such as it is

Fall came from leaves. Gossamer probably came from geese, and cider from a Hebrew word for any strong drink. Boontling named some things after the neighbors, like Jeff’s big fires and Zeese’s coffee. What would Boonville have named after you?

Word Junkie is a column for people who own too many dictionaries and are not sorry.