Free guide to Milan • July 2003 • Events • Exhibitions
Hello Milano • Year 8 • n° 7 • 1st-31st July 2003 • Iscrizione Tribunale di Milano 185/23.3.96
by Roberta Kedzierski
Less than fruitful outcomes
You know how I am always banging on about the fact that dictionaries
— especially bilingual ones — are not worth the paper they’re written
on? And how they need to be read critically and carefully, and that
everything they tell you should be checked and checked again? Well, I
got hoist with my own petard last month, didn’t I?
In the column Vegetable State in the June 2003 issue of HelloMilano, I
was talking about my favourite fruit, which are nespole. I was saying
that I had no idea what they were called in English. Mainly because I
had only ever encountered them here, and have never met any native-
English speakers who knew about them. So I was forced to turn to my
Italian-English dictionary. And what did I find as the first definition under
nespola but “medlar”?
Having no idea what a “medlar” was, I looked the word up in the English-
English dictionary. My Oxford Reference told me that it was a “fruit like
a small apple, eaten when decayed”. Which made it sound distinctly
unappetising. They do look rough at times, and the Italian ones are
always fairly beat-up looking because they suffer from an endemic fungal
disease. The Merriam Webster’s Collegiate provided a little more info,
calling “medlar” a word that entered the English language in the 14th
century, to describe “a small Eurasian tree (Mespilus germanica) of the
rose family whose fruit resembles a crab apple and is used in preserves”.
That did not figure either, but the It-Ing dictionary did day that nespola
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was a “medlar” didn’t it? Incontrovertible evidence, no?
Er, well, no, actually. For, it turns out that there is a difference between
nespolo, with an “o finale”, which is the tree, while nespola (con la “a
finale”) is the fruit from said tree.
The problem is that, in Italian, the word nespolo is used to describe
two different types of tree, from which — clearly — two different
fruits come. And here I have to thank Henry for his research work. In
the Encyclopedia Britannica, he found the explanation. There is the,
what we might call, common-or-garden Medlar or Mespilus germanica,
whose fruit is not fit to eat until it begins to decay and becomes
“bletted”. It is native to Europe, from Holland southwards.
Then there is the Japanese medlar or Eriobotrya japonica, or Loquat,
a sub-tropical tree, with orange-coloured fruit containing a couple of
large seeds. And here we have it — my nespola!
Now, had I read on in my Zanichelli/Ragazzini and got to the next
definition, which was nespolo , I would indeed have found a
reference to the nespolo del Giappone and I would have learned
that this is a … “loquat”. But I did not. And why not? Well, because
if I look up a word in the dictionary, I expect it to tell me what I
need to know in the space of one entry. I don’t see why I should
have to read the entry before and the entry following, just in case
these shed any light on the thing I was looking for. Or should I?
Obviously I should have. That would have saved the red faces,
and this great rant. Whatever.
Just to close, I had never before seen the word “bletted”, which is
used to describe the condition that the famous medlar has to be in
before it is in any way comestible. But, even without being strictly
onomatopoeic, it seems to convey the sense quite well, don’t you
think?
© 2003 Roberta Kedzierski