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The word food is generally defined as any nourishing substance that is taken into the body to sustain life, promote growth, or provide energy. It also may be characterized as solid and edible, as distinguished from drink, which is in liquid form. Or, as Ambrose Bierce defined edible: "Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm." It may sound fanciful, but food for worms has for seven centuries been used for a dead human being, alluding to burial, decomposition, and eventually being fed on by earthworms. Similarly food for fishes has almost as long been applied to victims of drowning.

In earlier centuries the figurative uses of the word food ranged much farther afield, particularly in spiritual contexts. A 15th-century hymn to the Virgin described God as the singer's food, and Shakespeare used it as a metaphor for love ("My faire sonne, my life, my joy, my food…"). Later poets such as Cowper and Wordsworth had it in more secular context, writing of food for the mind or intellect. From there it was but a short step to regarding an issue for discussion or consideration as food for thought, as Robert Southey had it in 1825: "A lively tale, and fraught/With food for thought" (Tale of Paraguay; cited by the OED).

TWO

FRUITS OF THE EARTH

The earliest human beings, like their simian forebears, survived by gathering whatever edible substances they could find in quantity. Raw fruits of various kinds were undoubtedly among the first human foodstuffs, and their value was recognized very early on, eons before the discovery of vitamin C and similar nutritional goodies.

In general a fruit is the part of a plant that contains its seeds and a vegetable is any edible part of a plant. These definitions are not hard and fast, however, and both exceptions and overlaps abound. Peas and beans bear seeds and might be called fruits but in fact they are generally called vegetables.

Moreover, both "vegetable" and "fruit" have additional and broader meanings. "Vegetable" often simply refers to any plant, in the widest sense. "Fruit," on the other hand, has the additional meaning of progeny or offspring (probably because it contains seeds), and by extension, the outcome or product of something or someone. Both appear throughout the Bible. The fruits of labor appears over and over, beginning with Exodus 23:16: "The feast of harvest, the first fruits of thy labors." "Ye shall know them by their fruits," said the gospel writer (Matthew 7:16), and again, "By their fruits ye shall know them" (7:20). And the Catholic liturgy has it, "Hail Mary, blessed be the fruit of thy womb."

Among the more secular sources using "fruit" to mean "outcome" is the proverb, "Much bruit and little fruit," another way of saying "A lot of talk but no results." It appears in Thomas Fuller's The Holy Warre, John Ray's English Proverbs (1670), and numerous other sources.

Further, fruit also acquired the connotation of wealth. When we speak of the fruits of the earth we are referring to natural riches, a meaning current since at least the 14th century. "The froytes of the er the make plentuus," according to the author of Lay Folks Mass Book (c. 1375), and a similar sentiment appears in the Book of Common Prayer:, "That it may please Thee to give and preserve to our use the kindly fruits of the earth."

According to lexicographer Eric Partridge, stolen fruit is a metaphor for illicit love and alludes to the "apple" stolen by Eve in the Garden of Eden. That may be true, although nowhere is it stated that the Tree of Knowledge was one of carnal knowledge. Moreover, over the centuries it has been pointed out again and again that something forbidden or difficult to obtain has more appeal than something easily attainable. Ovid was but one who used fruit to express this thought: "It is more pleasing to pluck an apple from the branch which you have seized than to take one from a graven dish" (Ex Ponto, c. A.D. 13).

"For months they have lain in wait…and now they are upon us, sodden with alcohol, their massive bodies bulging with strange green protuberances, attacking us in our homes…at our offices -- there is no escape, it is the hour of the fruitcake."

Oddly enough the estimable OED's first citation for "fruitcake, a cake containing fruit," is dated 1854. This type of cake, a heavy one containing fruit, especially raisins and other dried or candied fruits, was surely concocted long before that. Ideally, a fruitcake is made weeks or months in advance of consumption and stored airtight to "cure," so as to develop maximum flavor.

In America fruitcakes became associated with Christmas, perhaps because of their similarity to the traditional British Yule confection called plum pudding. Not only are they served in households during the holiday season, but they often are presented as a Christmas gift. In fact, however, fruitcakes are not universally loved, although not everyone has so negative a reaction as that in the quotation above. Nevertheless, it is not uncommon for one recipient to pass the cake along as a gift to someone else, giving rise to many jokes about the wandering fruitcake.

Perhaps it is this dislike that gave rise to the colloquial use of fruitcake for a crazy or eccentric individual. More likely, however, is the fact that fruitcakes today usually contain nuts, and nutty has been used to mean "eccentric" since the late 1800s. G. and S. Lorimer had it in their Heart Specialist (1935), "Listen, Alix, you're as nutty as a fruitcake." More recently it appeared in Ann Landers's syndicated advice column: "It never fails -- husbands who advertise they want sons always wind up nutty as fruitcakes over their daughters" (Boston Globe, Aug. 24, 1993).

Although being called a fruitcake is not exactly complimentary, it is nowhere near as disparaging or offensive as the use of fruit or fruity to describe male homosexuals. This slang usage became current in America in the 1940s but appears to have died out.

Finally, we have fruit salad (also known as fruit cup or fruit cocktail), a mélange of various cut-up fruits, fresh, canned or frozen, served as an appetizer, side dish, or dessert. The colorful appearance of this mixture gave rise to the military slang use of fruit salad for two or more rows of military campaign ribbons decorating the breast of a uniform.

APPLES

The apple, which is the most widely grown of all tree fruits and is produced in all moderate climates, has not escaped the problems of confusing nomenclature. The name love-apple was long used for the tomato, and not just in English -- it was pomme d'amour in French and Liebesapfel in German. And the name earth-apple was used for the potato, which is still called pomme de terre in modern French and Erdapfel in colloquial German.

Apples are eaten all over the world in various guises -- raw, stewed, baked, and roasted, in applesauce, apple juice and cider, apple jelly, and apple butter. Among the most familiar stories involving apples is that about Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, where Eve succumbs to temptation and eats some forbidden fruit. Today most people think of this fruit as an apple, but in fact nowhere in the Bible is the fruit identified specifically. According to Mohammedan belief, it was a banyan or Indian fig. Only later did Jewish and Christian tradition invariably make it an apple. (Some scholars believe that this identification came via readers of the Latin translation, the Vulgate Bible, and is based on the similarity between the Latin malus for "bad" and malum for "apple.")

In any event, apple has stuck, and in more ways than one: the familiar name Adam's apple was based on the idea that this projection of the thyroid cartilage at the front of the neck, which is more prominent in men than in women, was "caused" by Adam's eating a piece of the famous apple that got stuck in his throat.

The ancient Hebrews were partial to apples in naming a number of body parts. They used them for kneecaps, for tonsils, and for the heads of bones, as well as for the eye's pupil, called the apple of the eye. This expression very quickly was transferred to mean any object or person very dear to one -- after all, eyes are precious indeed. In the Bible it first crops up as "He kept him as the apple of his eye," referring to God's cherishing Israel (Deuteronomy 32:10), and reappears in at least two other Old Testament books, Proverbs (7:2) and Psalms (17:8).

The ancient Hebrew city of Sodom was destroyed along with Gomorrah for its wickedness, according to chapters 18 and 19 of the Book of Genesis, and gave rise to the word sodomy for sexual practices frowned on if not forbidden in the late Middle Ages. The apples of Sodom have a similar negative meaning. They are a yellow fruit that grows on the shores of the Dead Sea, beautiful to look at but extremely bitter to taste and filled with tiny black seeds that resemble ashes. Consequently they became a metaphor for extreme disappointment. John de Trevisa wrote of them in 1398: "Ther [by the Dead Sea] groweth most feyre applis…and when thou takest, he fadeth and falleth in to ashes." Poets continued to mention them over the centuries, as Byron did in his Childe Harold, but the term is heard less often today. A similar sentiment is expressed in an ancient proverb, cited as long ago as 1275 by the unknown collector of the Proverbs of Alfred: "Mani appel is uten grene briht on beme and biter with-innen" (Many an apple is fair on the tree and bitter within).

Apples figured in ancient Greek legend as well. Among the most famous is the apple of discord, which in modern terminology still means a cause of dispute. At the wedding of Thetis and Peleus, where all the gods and goddesses were assembled, Eris (Discord), furious that she had not been invited, threw among them a golden apple inscribed "for the fairest of them all." Three of the goddesses claimed it as their own -- Hera (Juno), Pallas Athena (Minerva), and Aphrodite (Venus). Each tried to bribe Paris, who was to decide which should have it, Hera promising him power and wealth, Pallas Athena military victory, and Aphrodite possession of the most beautiful woman on earth. He chose Aphrodite, who then helped him to seduce Helen of Troy, setting off the Trojan Wars, and the vengeance of the other two goddesses was said to have caused the fall of Troy.

Golden apples figure in several other Greek legends as well as in Scandinavian mythology, where Iduna guarded golden apples tasted by the gods when they wished to renew their youth. She was lured away from her post by the evil Loki but eventually was restored, so that the gods could grow young again and spring could return to the earth.

The term apple-cheeked appears often in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, where it originally meant blushing. Since the early 19th century, however, it has been used merely to describe a healthy, ruddy complexion, particularly in youngsters.

Apples figure in later legends as well. In the 13th century the Swiss patriot William Tell defied Gessler, steward of the Austrian duke, Albert I, and as punishment was told to shoot with his bow and arrow an apple placed on his own son's head. Tell succeeded without harming the boy and later killed Gessler. In the uprising that followed, Switzerland won independence from the hated Hapsburgs.

This story is almost certainly pure invention but became popular enough so that it was repeated by numerous chroniclers, including Friedrich von Schiller, who transformed it into a popular play, William Tell (1809), and Gioacchino Rossini, who used it as the subject of his last opera (1829).

Another oft-repeated apple legend is the story of Sir Isaac Newton, which was told (and perhaps originated) by the French philosopher Voltaire. Allegedly Newton's niece told Voltaire that while the British physicist was visiting his mother in 1666, he saw an apple fall from a tree. It was this everyday occurrence that supposedly led him to formulate his laws of gravitation and laws of motion, the two achievements for which he is best remembered.

Ascribing medicinal value to apples dates from the 16th century. "An apple a day keeps the doctor away" is the modern version, but numerous others exist. In the Arabian Nights, Prince Ahmed buys an apple at Samarkand that is said to cure all diseases. "He that will not a wife wed must eat a cold apple when he goeth to bed," wrote Thomas Cogan, author of The Haven on Health (1612), referring to the belief that an apple quenches "the flame of Venus" i.e., sexual desire). The same sentiment, if not precisely the same idea, was echoed by E. M. Wright in Rustic Speech (1913), "Ait a happle avore gwain to bed, An' you'll make the doctor beg his bread." And probably both were meant by the humorist who quipped, "An apple a day keeps the doctor away, as the lover of the doctor's wife said when he urged her to feed her husband apples."

The contagiousness of rotten apples was observed long before the mechanism of such spoilage was understood. It is documented in an ancient Latin proverb, Pomum compunctum cito corrumpit sibi iunctum, which was translated into English by Dan Michel of Northgate (in Ayenbite of Inwyt, 1340) and cited by Chaucer in The Cokes Tale.

No amount of polishing will restore a rotten apple to health, as any wise apple will tell any apple polisher. The term wise apple, for a clever, shrewd individual, is generally thought to be a variant of "wiseacre," meaning the same thing. However, John Ciardi discovered that a particular variety of apple was so called in England because it blooms so late that it misses the spring frosts (and the attendant risk of losing its blossoms, and consequently fruit).

The term apple polishing for attempting to win someone's favor through flattery and gifts comes from the practice of schoolchildren bringing the gift of a bright and shiny apple to their teacher (in hopes of better grades or some other form of tutorial mercy). An Americanism, it has been around since the 1920s or perhaps even longer. Only slightly older is appleknocker, derogatory American slang for a farm worker since about 1910; it alludes to the practice of picking apples by knocking them down from the tree.

A much older locution is to upset the applecart, which has been around since ancient Roman times, although occasionally with somewhat different meanings. The Roman writer Plautus used it c. 200 B.C., Plaustrum perculi, translated as "I've upset the cart" and meaning 'I've ruined things." This is the most common usage, but the estimable Francis Grose, in his Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1796), held that the cart, which had become an applecart by this time, really stood for the human body, and upsetting it meant knocking someone down. Other late 18th-century citations point to the more common and present-day usage. In 1788 J. Belknap wrote, "S[amuel] Adams had almost overset the apple-cart by intruding an amendment of his own fabrication on the morning of the day of ratification [of the Constitution]" (cited by the OED).

Although pastry chefs and good home cooks alike may pride themselves on neatly arranging the apple slices on a pie crust, this term for meticulous neatness most likely has a quite different source, and nothing whatever to do with apples. It apparently is a British corruption of the French phrase, nappes pliées en ordre, meaning linen neatly folded.

Some authorities believe that the same phrase also is the source of apple-pie bed, referring to the venerable boarding-school and summer-camp trick of doubling back the bottom sheet so that a person getting into bed cannot extend his or her legs very far. However, in the author's checkered childhood this practice of short-sheeting was simply called making a pie-bed and both these terms probably allude to folding over a turnover or similar piecrust pastry. This theory is verified by Francis Grose, who defined it, "A bed made apple-pye fashion, like what is called a turnover apple-pye, where the sheets are so doubled as to prevent anyone from getting at his length between them; a common trick played by frolicsome country lasses on their sweethearts, male relations, or visitors" (1796).

As American as apple pie is a puzzling term, inasmuch as apple pies were being baked in England long before America was colonized. Nevertheless, apple pie has been identified with American patriotism, family values, community spirit, and similar virtues often addressed in political speeches, for a very long time. As William Zinsser put it when discussing hot dogs, "We have long since made it [the hot dog] our own, a twin pillar of democracy along with Mom's apple pie. In fact, now that Mom's apple pie comes frozen and baked by somebody who isn't Mom, the hot dog stands alone" (Life, Oct. 9, 1969).

Present-day fans and promoters of New York City's pleasures often refer to that metropolis as "the Big Apple." Actually this contemporary-sounding term was born in the early 20th century and originally was a metaphor for any big city. By the early 1920's it was being extended to the peak of certain endeavors -- Broadway, a top jazz club, competing for big bucks at a New York racetrack. Finally it became a nickname for New York City, kept alive mainly by jazz musicians who, if they played in New York, believed they were now in "the big time." (One source suggests there was a Harlem nightclub known as the Big Apple that jazz musicians held in high regard.) In the swing era of the late 1930's the Big Apple was the name of a popular dance. It was described, in a song of the same name by Lee David and John Redmond, as a round dance. The dancers formed a circle and a caller shouted out the movements, which actually combined various steps from such earlier dances as the shag and black bottom. Both the song and the dance, which ended with shouting the words "Praise Allah!" have largely died out, but the Big Apple is still very much alive. (John Ciardi suggested the term was originally a translation of the Spanish manzana principal, manzana meaning both apple and city block, and holds it was first used by black jazz musicians in New Orleans about 1910, but this origin seems unlikely.) In the 1970's the New York City Convention Bureau adopted Big Apple as a nickname for the city, replacing the earlier name of Fun City.

Another 20th-century term is apples and oranges,, used as a metaphor for dissimilarity. For example, "You can't compare a huge conglomerate to a small family-owned enterprise; that's comparing apples and oranges." Its origin is no longer known, but some speculate it comes from arithmetic lessons teaching youngsters that one cannot add unlike objects. In any event, it has totally replaced the much older apples and oysters, which dates from the 16th century and appeared as a proverb in John Ray's 1670 collection. "No more like than an apple to an oyster," declared Sir Thomas More (Works, 1557). Thomas Fuller's Gnomologia of 1732 introduced apples and lobsters, but that did not become particularly common. And Cockney rhyming slang has apples and pears for "stairs," but this phrase has nothing to do with disparity.

The name "applesauce" for a puree of stewed apples sweetened with sugar has been around since the early 18th century, and the dish probably much long than that. Its transfer to mean nonsense, or wild exaggeration, or insincere flattery, dates from the early 1920's and began in America. It is less often heard today.

YES, WE HAVE NO BANANAS

A tropical fruit, the banana probably originated in southern Asia and has been known in the Western world since ancient times. Alexander the Great found it in India in 327 B.C.

Bananas began to be imported into the United States in the first half of the 19th century, mainly from Cuba. By 1900 they constituted a tremendous trade in Latin America, largely sponsored by U.S. businesses that set up railroads and shipping lines (with banana boats) to transport the fruit from Costa Rica, Guatemala, El Salvador and other Latin American countries. Indeed, those nations whose economy depended largely on this fruit began to be called, in the 1930's, banana republics,, a term now considered disparaging and demeaning. (No such pejorative sense attaches to Bananaland, a colloquial Australian name for the state of Queensland, where bananas also grow.) A 1971 film, Bananas, by Woody Allen, is a hilarious treatment of a revolution in just such a country. However, the farce does not mitigate the unfortunate truth that the former banana republics have had serious economic problems and a difficult and largely violent political history.

The humor in Allen's movie is often of the banana-peel variety -- that is, broad farce. The term alludes to a pratfall caused by slipping on a banana peel, a comic device dating from the early 1900's. Eric Partridge also chronicles the catch phrase, "You've got one foot in the grave and the other on a banana skin," meaning you're in a very precarious position, which he says was common in British soccer clubs in the 1920's.

The banana crops up in a number of specialized sports terms that generally allude to its physical properties (curved and soft). In soccer a banana kick denotes an off-center kick that makes the ball curve or bend in flight before suddenly dropping, and in golf a banana ball is a sliced ball that travels in a long arc. In ice hockey a banana blade is a stick with an exaggeratedly curved blade, affording the player better control (but there are rules governing the maximum curve allowed). In baseball a banana stick is a poorly made bat, which is in effect too soft. Finally, the banana seat of a bicycle is tapered at the front and curves upward at the back.

Show business, initially vaudeville and later legitimate theater, used the term top banana for the leading comedian in a show, probably beginning in the early 20th century but not cited by conventional sources until about 1950. (It may first have been used for Frank Lebowitz, a burlesque comedian who used bananas in his act.) This in turn gave rise to second banana for a supporting comedian. Both terms have been transferred to more general usage, top banana to the principal individual in any group or undertaking and, somewhat less often, second banana to a supporting person.

An older but still current usage is that of bananas to mean crazy in an excited or violent fashion, particularly in the phrases to go bananas and to drive (someone) bananas. John Ciardi theorized that the analogy here is to the banana's being curved (rather than straight), but offers no verification, and dates it from about 1900. The earliest citation in the OED, however, is dated 1935, and the American Speech editors find one only in 1957.

The use of banana oil, a paint solvent and artificial-flavor agent, for nonsense or gibberish dates from the 1920's. The analogy here is unclear, if ever there was one, and the term appears to be dying out, at least in America. This is not true of an equally meaningless expression, Yes, we have no bananas, which according to Eric Partridge was one of the most popular catch phrases of the 1920's. It began as the title and refrain of a highly popular nonsense song by Frank Silver and Irving Cohn -- "Yes we have no bananas, we have no bananas today" -- who allegedly got the idea by overhearing a Greek fruit peddler tell a customer, "Yes, we have no bananas." According to popular-song authority David Ewen, they introduced the song in a New York City restaurant but it failed to catch on. In 1923, however, Eddie Cantor saw the song in manuscript while a revue he was starring in, Make It Snappy, was playing in Philadelphia. Held over for an extended run, the show needed new material, since patrons were coming to see it a second time. Cantor decided to include "Yes, We Have No Bananas" in one of his routines, and the song stopped the show for more than a quarter of an hour. The song was retained, of course, and Cantor continued to bring down the house with it. By the end of the year it was being sung all over America. Subsequent revivals helped keep the phrase alive. In 1930 the song was used in the motion-picture musical Mammy, starring Al Jolson, and in 1954 Eddie Cantor sang it on the soundtrack of The Eddie Cantor Story. Perhaps the greatest tribute to the song came from humorist Will Rogers, who in a piece entitled "The Greatest Document in American Literature" (1924) wrote, "The subject for this brainy Editorial is resolved that, 'Is the Song Yes We Have No Bananas the greatest or the worst Song that America ever had?'" and concludes, "I would rather have been the Author of that Banana Masterpiece than the Author of the Constitution of the United States. No one has offered any amendments to it. It's the only thing ever written in America that we haven't changed, most of them for the worst." And, of course, the phrase as it stands is utter nonsense.

IT'S THE BERRIES

Generally speaking, a berry is a small, juicy fruit, roughly round in shape and usually stoneless. Among the best-known kinds are blackberries, blueberries and huckleberries, currants, gooseberries, mulberries, raspberries, and strawberries.

In early 20th-century American slang, the berries meant superlative or outstanding. "It's the berries" was more or less equivalent to the roughly contemporary "it's the cat's pajamas," but like the latter is no longer heard.

Although blackberries both grow wild and are cultivated in America, linguistically they are better known in Great Britain. They are apparently prolific, whence the term plentiful as blackberries, used (and perhaps invented) by Shakespeare (King Henry IV, Part 1, 2:4). The British equivalent of America's Indian summer -- a spell of warm, sunny weather in late September and early October -- is blackberry summer, since that is the time of the berry harvest.

Blueberries also are known on both sides of the Atlantic, but it is the name of a native American variety, the huckleberry, that crops up most frequently. They, too, are prolific, and thick as huckleberries was a common simile by the 1830's. The berry turns up in several comparative contexts as well, where it generally means a small amount or slightly. "Within a huckleberry f being smothered to death" (J. K. Paulding, Westward Ho, 1832) -- that is, very close to being smothered -- is one of the earliest. It was still current in 1920, when Edward Bok wrote, "He always kept 'a huckleberry or two' ahead of his readers" (Americanization). A more curious comparison is one that turns up throughout the 19th century. "It's a disgraceful shot -- what I call a full huckleberry below a persimmon," wrote J. K. Paulding (Banks of the Ohio, 1833). And similarly, although in the opposite direction, "I'm a huckleberry above that persimmon because I'm the chief cook" (D. A. Porter, Incidents of the Civil War, 1885). Both phrases allude to the disparate size of the plants, that is, the low-growing huckleberry bush versus the much taller (30 to 60 feet high) persimmon tree. (Also see PERSIMMON.)

The huckleberry also functioned like the 20th-century raspberry (see below). "He got the huckleberry, as we used to say in college," wrote Henry A. Beers (Century Magazine, 1883), meaning he was derided. Further, it denoted romantic suitability, as in "If she were looking for a husband, you were her huckleberry." Both usages are obsolete.

Undoubtedly the best-known huckleberry in history is Huckleberry Finn, the hero of Mark Twain's novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). He first appeared in Twain's The Adventure of Tom Sawyer (1875), where he is described as the juvenile pariah of the village, son of the town drunkard, neglected, ragged, and often hungry, but, to the envy of respectable children, free from rules, church or school attendance, bathing, and similar restrictions.

His name is never explained, but possibly it relates to the meaning of huckleberry as a trifle, something of little worth, which was how Huck Finn was considered by the townspeople. If this allusion accounts for Twain's choice of his name, it is ironic, since royalties from these two books were far from trifling, making the author very wealthy indeed.

In the late 1950's, Huckleberry Hound became a well-known character in a television cartoon show of that name by Hannah/Barbera, which also introduced the even more popular Yogi Bear. However, it is doubtful that he will achieve the lasting fame of Twain's Huck Finn.

The gooseberry is better known in Britain than in America, as are most of the terms concerning it. "All the other gifts are not worth a gooseberry," wrote Shakespeare in King Henry IV (Part 2, 1:2), implying both small size and little worth. To play gooseberry in the 19th century meant to chaperone lovers. Brewer speculates that this refers to a tactful chaperon going off to pick gooseberries so as to give the lovers privacy. On the other hand, to play old gooseberry with something or someone meant to make havoc or take great liberties. It may also be obsolete.

Mulberries also are better known in the Old World than the New. One variety of mulberry bears red berries, and legend has it that they were originally white but became blood-red from the blood of Pyramus and Thisbe. However, the black or American mulberry bears dark, purplish-red berries, giving rise to the adjective mulberry-faced for someone very red in the face. Tennyson had it in Lucretius:

"Hired animalisms, vile as though that made

The mulberry-faced Dictator's orgie worse

Than aught they fable of the quiet Gods."

While this term is seldom heard in America, Here we go round the mulberry bush remains a popular children's game on both sides of the Atlantic. The children stand in a circle and act out the words to the song, at first walking in a circle (Here we go round…), then pretending to wash clothes (This is the way we wash our clothes…). etc. And, alluding to their clusterlike habit of growth, dentists call a tooth with more than the usual four cusps a mulberry molar.

To give someone the raspberry means to show extreme disrespect by making a rude noise with the tongue pushed through the lips. It has been so called since the 19th century, and the Random House Unabridged Dictionary (second edition) advances the theory that it originated as a shortening of "raspberry tart," rhyming slang for "fart" (for the sound produced) but gives no conclusive evidence for it.

-- John E. Palmer (words) and Charles B.Ward (music), The Band Played On (1895)

Strawberries are singularly appealing to the human palate. "Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did," wrote Dr. William Butler about 1621, a statement with which Izaak Walton (of The Compleat Angler) and numerous later writers concurred. The annual world-famous tennis tournament held at Wimbledon, England is every bit as renowned for the strawberries and cream served there as for its championship. And all this despite the fact that "One man's strawberries, another man's hives," as some humorist quipped -- for strawberries are among the items frequently involved in food allergy.

The strawberry blonde in the Gay Nineties song quoted above has hair of an attractive, reddish-blond color. The raised, bright-red, berry-like birthmark called a strawberry mark is not considered particularly beautiful. Technically called a capillary hemangioma, it develops soon after birth and tends to enlarge slowly over the next few months. In the majority of cases it will disappear by itself within five to seven years. Those that do not are either left or treated with medication. This birthmark figures in a famous 19th-century farce, J. M. Morton's Box and Cox, about two lodgers who, each unknown to the other, alternately occupy the same boarding-house room, one at night and the other by day. When they finally meet, a distinctive strawberry mark present on one enables them to recognize one another as long-lost brothers.

LIFE IS JUST A BOWL OF CHERRIES

Cherries, which may have originated in China some 4,000 years ago, were first cultivated in Greece. They were introduced to America with the earliest settlers and the trees were well established before the American Revolution -- as witnessed by the famous legend of young George Washington's hatchet attack on his father's favorite tree. Japanese cherry trees, grown only for their beautiful blossoms (their fruit doesn't amount to much), are a mecca for tourists in Washington, D.C. every spring; the capital's trees were a gift from the city of Tokyo, Japan.

Cherries, like many fruits, must be picked by hand to avoid being damaged. Thus the well-known cherry picker is something of a misnomer. It actually is a crane with a movable boom, enabling a worker at the top to pick fruit, or, more commonly, repair telephone lines, prune trees, and do similar chores. The term has been used for such devices only since the first half of the 20th century. In the 1800's, however, it became a nickname for the 11th Hussars when a detachment of theirs was surprised by French cavalry in a Spanish orchard in 1811 and had to fight a dismounted action. They also were called Cherry Breeches and Cherrybums for the very tight red trousers their officers were commanded to wear in 1840 by their regimental commander, the 7th Earl of Cardigan. This usage died out, along with the regiment (they merged with another to form the Royal Hussars in 1969). In 20th-century basketball, to cherry pick means to remain near the basket while play is at the other end of the court, in hopes of receiving a long pass and making an easy (because it is undefended) basket.

Another 20th-century term is cherry bomb, which has no ballistic significance but alludes only to the fruit's appearance: it is a red, globe-shaped firecracker that explodes with a loud bang but is essentially harmless. It has been so called since about 1950.

A number of sayings about cherries allude to their small size, sometimes (but not always) equated with little worth. Thus, something not worth a cherry has meant, since the 15th century, practically worthless. On the other hand, the use of cherrycherry

ONE

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

TWO

FRUITS OF THE EARTH

APPLES

YES, WE HAVE NO BANANAS

IT'S THE BERRIES

LIFE IS JUST A BOWL OF CHERRIES