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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
I’m all but living outdoors these warm spring days, tending to my gardens. You may have noticed that things herbal have been in my thoughts lately (recent posts, for example, on mandrakes, carnations, wheat. ) Where the body goes, the mind follows.
German Chamomile (Matricaria chamomillia) is a reliable early bloomer in our area. Three spearmint leaves, three lemon balm leaves, and ten blooms of chamomile steeped in boiling water, strained into a cup, then sweetened with a little honey make an excellent tea. We were already drinking it by the end of May. I have also made a tea from German Chamomile’s cousin, Pineappleweed (Matricaria discoidea), a plant that can be picked along most walkways and roadsides in North America in the late spring. Pineappleweed does not have the same singing flavor and health benefits that German Chamomile has. Also, I have trouble finding Pineappleweed blooms that aren’t in a DPZ.1
Plants in the related genuses of Matricaria and Anthemis have historically been called “mayweeds.†In modern North American usage the term “mayweed†is more restrictive-it is usually reserved for Anthemis cotula, Stinking Mayweed, Matricaria (Tripleurospermum) inodora, Scentless Mayweed, and Anthemis arvensis, Corn Chamomile, three invaders from Europe (none of which make a decent tea, by the way).
Since mayweeds, especially the Matricaria species, put out early blooms, friends of the these plants assume there is some connection between the bloom time (May) and the name. Here’s an example that seems to have bought into this seat-of-the-pants semantics:
Caption for a picture on a naturalist’s site “On Assateague, mayweed blooms in May as the name implies â€
The etymology of the term “mayweed†nixes the connection between mayweeds and the month of May. Mayweeds were originally called “maythes,†“maidweeds†or “maidenweeds†in English, all terms derived from the Teutonic term for a girl or unmarried woman. The association of the plant and the person was probably medical: the old herbals recommend mayweeds for “female complaints.”2
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(1) Dog Pee Zone.
(2) On the web “female complaints†occurs twenty times more often than “male complaints.†To no surprise, “male ego” occurs twenty times as often as “female ego.”
Last edited by kem (2009-06-04 02:03:28)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Lovely – you made me want to prepare a nice cup of herbal tea. And I can attest to its effectiveness for period pains. Matricaria comes from matrix, meaning “uterus”.
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I’ll take your word on it, Chris. I learned a long time ago that it doesn’t pay to get into spitting matches about pain. Men always lose. An anecdote I told in one of my books:
A few years ago a surgeon asked me, when examining my torn rotator cuff, to rate the pain in my shoulder on a scale of one to ten. “Ten,†I responded without hesitation. “Oh, surely not,†the surgeon said. “Ten would be childbirth.†I felt like I had been handed a trick question. How could a man compare the screams coming from his injured shoulder to something that he could never experience?
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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I went through childbirth (medication-free) & found it more exhausting than painful. I can easily imagine headaches and toothaches more sharply painful. Although it is possible that some instances of childbirth are much more painful than mine as well.
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