A sign of the season: Pumpkins and other cucurbits sit on a garden cart during a festival in Nevers, France, on October 4.
Frédéric Moreau/Hans Lucas/AFP/Getty Images
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Pumpkins are the bookends of fall. Headlines about the arrival of pumpkin spice lattes signal the end of summer. And soon after the last bites of pumpkin pie at the Thanksgiving table, we turn our attention to winter holiday plans. Between the two, jack-o-lanterns are the stars of Halloween.
Seasonal squash also evokes a romanticized ideal of simpler times, according to Cindy Ott, author of Pumpkin: the curious story of an American icon.
“Pumpkins are more popular than ever,” Ott, an associate professor of history at the University of Delaware, told NPR. “People buy these things, even pumpkin spice lattes, because of these attachments, these very old-fashioned ideas about respecting the small family farm.”
As his comment suggests, it wasn’t always like this. Like a squash growing on a disjointed vine, the “pumpkin” took a rather circuitous path before reaching the omnipresence of the PSL. For this episode of Word of the Week, we follow the path.
Where does the word “pumpkin” come from?
The word “pumpkin” has long referred to an idea rather than a specific plant.
“The pumpkin itself is not exactly a botanical group,” says Logan Kistler, curator of archaeobotanics and archaeogenomics at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. “It’s more about describing the shape of any type of squash that people have grown to resemble what we think of as pumpkins.”
The word “pumpkin” itself began with the Greek word pepon and evolved into French pompomaccording to Fiona McPherson, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Pumpkin, she says, is a variation of “pompion,” an English word dating back to the 1500s.
While the roots of the word are often linked to Europe, the plant’s roots are firmly planted in the Americas, with thousands of years of history.
“The first example we have of ‘pumpkin’ dates from 1647,” McPherson says, “apparently in reference to the poor diet of the early settlers” of the New World.
When European settlers reached what is now the Americas, they encountered Native people growing pumpkins, a useful food source that was easy to grow and could be stored in cold weather.
“Pumpkin was often used as a general term, in the same way that the word ‘corn’ once referred to any grain rather than a specific food,” Ott says.
“Pumpkins are part of this genus Cucurbita“, according to Kistler, who says the plants were grown throughout North, Central and South America. “In precolonial times, indigenous peoples of the Americas domesticated different types of these pumpkin precursors at least six different times. So there are what we recognize as pumpkins native to all of the Americas, dating back about 10,000 years to Mexico. »
A Pumpkin Regatta runner paddles a giant pumpkin into the water in Kasterlee, Belgium, October 22, 2023. Participants race a distance of 100 meters in hollowed-out pumpkins during the annual event.
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Many of these species are easy to find today, whether weighed at a state fair (Cucurbita maxima) or canned for baking (Cucurbita moschata).
While other plant names have persisted since then, McPherson says, “‘pumpkin’ is obviously the word that has taken over.”
Who are you calling a pumpkin?
Shortly after the word was first used in English, “pumpkin” became a way to throw shade.
“The most interesting thing about calling people pumpkins is that it’s so consistent,” Ott says, citing paintings and stories going back centuries. “For women, it’s often associated with their bodies.”
Pumpkin imagery has been used to suggest that a woman is driven by her natural impulses, “instead of being cerebral and polite,” Ott adds. “And for man, it’s always been associated with his head, like an empty-headed person. (It’s) been used by politicians for hundreds of years.”
To McPherson, it’s striking how quickly the word “pumpkin” became an insult.
“It didn’t take long to develop this figurative usage,” she says, adding that around 1680 the pumpkin was “applied with contempt to a person who was a little vain, arrogant or stupid.”
A gourd becomes the symbol of a romanticized past
By the end of the 19th century, Ott says, the rehabilitation of the word “pumpkin” into the language was underway. For one thing, it’s become a term of endearment to call kids pumpkins, she said. And around the same time, the pumpkin became a symbol of old-fashioned ways of life – a touchstone in poems and genre paintings as urbanization took hold in the United States.
“So Americans are leaving the country to move to cities, but they like to imagine themselves as farmers at heart, many of them,” Ott explains. “And a pumpkin was a way to maintain those connections. That’s when the pumpkin became THE pumpkin. It is a cultural story, not a botanical one. »
Today, this story has a turning point. Descendants of the same pumpkins that once supported indigenous civilizations and early settlers now support modern small farmers, Ott says. Tapping into nostalgia for our agrarian past, farmers are putting pumpkins front and center as they transform their farms into what Ott calls “agrarian wonderlands” to attract visitors.
“The cool thing about this whole story,” she says, is that “these very romantic ideas and myths that a lot of Americans tell themselves about their origin stories actually help to rejuvenate what it represents: a small family farm.”
