The last time we discussed the word portobello ‘mature cremino mushroom,’ the etymology was unknown despite a plethora of suggestions. Well, it may still not be exactly known, but at least we have an authoritative hypothesis; MMcM of the brand-new blog Polyglot Vegetarian (“Grazing through the world of words”) had the excellent idea of looking for the word in the latest update to the OED, and (in the words of his latest post) “sure enough, they’ve got it”:
Brit. /ˌpɔ:təˈbɛləʊ/, U.S. /ˌpɔrdəˈbɛloʊ/ Forms: 19- portabella, 19- portabello, 19- portobello. [Perh. alteration of Italian pratarolo meadow mushroom.]
More fully portobello mushroom. A large brown variety of the common edible mushroom, having an open flat cap and a distinctive musky smell.
1990 Doylestown (Pennsylvania) Intelligencer 28 Oct. C12/3 Out of darkness now emerge the cream-colored and fuller flavoured crimani.. the wild tasting portobello and the soft-for-soup oyster mushroom. 1998 Scotl. on Sunday (Nexis) 26 July 32 Before grilling, stuff meaty Portabello mushrooms with oil-soaked crumbs and grated Parmesan or crumbled goat’s cheese. 2004 Phytochemistry 65 671/2 Tyrosinase, laccase, and peroxidase were detected in portabella mushrooms, a brown strain of Agaricus bisporus.
He adds “I am amazed that the earliest quotation they could come up with is from 1990,” and so am I. I welcome the new addition to the blogosphere, and am encouraged by his scrupulous reproduction of the OED’s formatting—too many people just paste in the text and ignore the itals and bolds; I recommend his earlier posts on vegan, okra, and burek.
Thanks for the kind plug.
Speaking of Okra, I don’t think I knew of its existence before it was a clue in the Sydney Morning Herald’s cryptic crossword of Thursday last week (the 4th). Then again, the clue was so easy (as are all of NS’s clues), that one need not know much:
OK right before a vegetable (4)
I reckon I learn more erudite words (not that ‘okra’ is especially erudite) doing the cryptic than by any other method.
This is close to Merriam-Webster’s reasoning: “Etymology: perhaps alteration of Italian prataiolo, prataiuolo or dialect Italian pratarolo meadow mushroom, from prato meadow, from Latin pratum.”
1990 might be pretty close to the start.
Books.Google.com has no citations until 1993. That one is in a book called Microbiology: Principles and Applications, by Jacquelyn G. Black. The context is “Phillips is also experimenting with growing small quantities of specialty mush-rooms such as Portobello, Nameko, winecaps and mitake. These are new to Americans and are appearing in gourmet restaurants and specialty produce stores. Once the cultivation methods are better worked out, production will increase…” (Snippet view ends here.) First citations in both cookbooks and fiction are 1994; the floodgates open in 1996 and 1997.
The earliest occurrence on Usenet, according to Google, is a mushroom stew recipe from 2 May 1992.
It seems odd to replace one Italian word in English with a different Italian word (or perhaps a compound of two Italian words). I suspect brandnaming (like “kiwi fruit” and “canola oil”). “Portobello” is Italian in a more satisfying way than “pratarolo”. And bellissimo!
I have posted over there that Poland has long had its own Turks (Tatars, since 1410 or before), so “pierogi” could be a Turkish word cognate with “burek” etc., via a different transmission.
Vasmer calls the Turkic etymology implausible because the word doesn’t exist in South Slavic, but that sounds silly to me. (He suggests an etymology from pir ‘feast’ with an -og suffix, which doesn’t strike me as inherently more plausible.)
At least one Internet source, the “Gourmet Sleuth”, seems to think the name might come from Portobello Road, the famous market street in London.
Did nobody else see this is the “Barron’s” section of Answers.com :
Notice that, between the AHD, the OED, and Barron’s we can find all nine spellings “portabela”, “portabella”, “portabello”, “portobela”, “portobella”, “portobello”, and “portobelo”.
I suspected that — like “kiwi fruit” and “canola.”
I agree with the marketing ploy theory. From this 2000 article: http://www.bio.net/bionet/mm/mycology/2000-January/007716.html :
“In a triumph of marketing, the portobello mushroom, once considered an oddball – shunned and discarded – came out of nowhere in 1985 and
started to take off in the early ‘90s. It has become a major food item in the past five years, capturing 8 percent of the mushroom market.”
Unfortunately, no citation for the 1985 date.
Here’s your 1985 citation, as reported by Barry Popik on ADS-L in 2002:
The OED has added the quote “Enormous Portobello mushrooms from Italy” dated 1985, but attributed to the Lawrence (Kansas) Daily Journal-World, 11 Dec. — almost certainly a reprint from the New York Times, and the OED should have checked that. (This is the page cited, but I’d have to pay to get a readable image.)
U.S. /ˌpɔrdəˈbɛloʊ/
I am very doubtful about that /d/; it’s not in intervocalic position in AmE and so should not be voiced. I suppose non-rhotic AmE would be a different story.
OK right before a vegetable
“Sooner right before a lady’s finger” might have been better, not that I am any sort of expert on cryptics.
Poland has long had its own Turks (Tatars, since 1410 or before)
But by the mid-1500s they had pretty much abandoned Tatar for variously Polish, Lithuanian, or Belarusian, though they continued to use the Arabic script to write their new languages for some time (in the case of Belarusian, until the 1930s).
I remember noticing that the name portobello seemed to pop up rather suddenly in the 1990s, with people using it as if the term had always been around. Prior to the explosion of interest in the mushrooms, I would have only associated to the word with Disney’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks.
As I probably should’ve noticed, the New York Times writer was confused in including “Portobello” (and why capitalized?) in a list of *wild* mushrooms, and in saying they were “from Italy”. Enormous portobello mushrooms sold in New York City would have been cultivated, probably in Pennsylvania, which dominates the US in mushroom sales volume.
Not a botanist, but I think the OED definition is not quite technically correct in calling portobello a “large brown variety” of mushroom: in the context of botany, “variety” implies that the distinction is heritable, but the largeness of portobellos is only a function of age, not genetics. I think MW’s “a large dark mature cultivated mushroom noted for its meaty texture that is of the same variety of button mushroom as the cremini” uses the word correctly in its technical sense. Any biologists here, please check.
@JC: i entirely agree: i don’t think i’ve heard /d/ in rhotic u.s.an for the mushroom; non-rhotic (boston/nyc/nj), i think, uses a flap.
Merriam-Webster’s etymology (quoted by JKelly above) is actually better than the OED’s, imho, since it makes clear that prataiolo is a word of standard Italian and pratarolo is not.
AHD, in 2011, was (I think quite rightly) skeptical enough to disregard this suggested etymology and leave it at “Origin unknown”. If it was coined for marketing purposes, pratarolo isn’t a sufficient explanation; the “-bella/o” could’ve been tacked on to suggest a nice Italian word that Americans are likely to know, but we don’t really know.
I’ve also seen portabella, with an equally valid and equally pointless etymology. I would guess it’s a later twist on portobello by non-Italians.
“Portobello” (and why capitalized?)
Probably a copy editor looked it up in a gazetteer, found the Portobello Road, and went with that spelling and capitalization.
non-rhotic (boston/nyc/nj)
Most of New Jersey is firmly rhotic. I grew up in Newark only half an hour by car from where I have been living in the East Village for 40+ years now, and I remain as rhotic as ever. Labov says that Newark is non-rhotic as well as Jersey City, but he may mean the AAVE parts of it: I grew up in the North Ward, at the time a mostly Italian-American enclave. (Technically I was born in Montclair, but only because that happened to be where my mother’s obstetrician had hospital privileges.)
To me, and perhaps to the marketers who coined it, portobello echoes porterhouse.
Portobello on the edge of Edinburgh was named after a South American battle, and I assume the Portobello Road is the same – the name is not quite either Spanish or Portugese, but definitely not Italian, so it’s interesting that it’s considered so definitely Italian for the mushroom.
Despite my rhotic Americanness, for me a preceding /r/ doesn’t seem to affect the sound of intervocalic /t/ after a stressed syllable. “Portabello”, “porter”, “charter”, “hurtle”, “cater”, “bottle”, “vital”, “beating”, etc., all have the same sound. I don’t know whether to describe it as a d or a flap. The same is not true for a preceding /n/ or /l/ (“canter”, “melting”), in which case the /t/ is distinct from /d/.
My Newark housemate (white) gave the local pronunciation as “Noork,” rhotic, one syllable.
Keith Ivey: Do you distinguish hurtle and hurdle?
Y: No, not in normal speech, any more than I distinguish beating and beading (“The rain is ___ on the window”). It’s possible that the vowel is longer before the d, but I can’t tell for sure.
Before syllabic n, the /t/ is not a flap though, more like a glottal stop: “button”, “carton”, “mountain”, “molten” (though maybe I’m more likely to use something more [t]-like after /n/ and /l/).
Comments are also continuing at the other thread.
i don’t have a clear enough memory to be sure, but it’s entirely possible the jerseyans in my mind’s ear on this one are speaking an nyc english, not one that’s properly of new jersey.
My Newark housemate (white) gave the local pronunciation as “Noork,” rhotic, one syllable.
For me it’s a “hypermonosyllable” like flower or seven, which can be monosyllabic or disyllabic depending on the surrounding prosody:
Édward’s sev’n sóns, whereóf thysélf art óne,
Wére as séven víals of‿his sácred blóod,
Or sév’n fair bránches sprínging fróm one róot:
—Richard II I:ii
(Note that vials is also a hypermonosyllable, in this case monosyllabic.)
Do you distinguish hurtle and hurdle?
I do.
My fave hypermonosyllable is orange, /ʌɹnd͡ʒ/. I heard one person use it, from upstate New York, and saw it in some jokey book about how hillbillies talk (in West Virginia, maybe.)
This decade-plus-old piece says that the Quaker-founded mushroom industry around Kennett Square, Pa. (in Chester County) soon enough became dominated by Italian-Americans, although it doesn’t follow from that that they had any impact whatsoever on affixing the name “Portobello” to a particular variety versus just growing whatever varieties the market seemed to want to buy based on big-city culinary trends. The increasing prevalence of Mexican immigrants in the low-paid scutwork end of the mushroom business, adverted to by the article, was already happening back in 1983 when I spent the summer working on the grounds crew of the Kennett Square Golf & Country Club (for 30 cents/hour above minimum wage, which seemed a sweet deal to my teenaged self at the time). The area was going through that transitional phase where bilingual signage was starting to appear as the Hispanophone percentage of the local population rose above de minimis, although with the first instances of bilingual signage being mostly the negative sort (No Smoking, No Trespassing, that sort of thing). https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/10/12/162719130/how-a-sleepy-pennsylvania-town-grew-into-americas-mushroom-capital
Wére as séven víals of‿his sácred blóod,
Why this, and not the more obvious “Wére as sev’n víals of his sácred blóod”?
Y: When I was a boy in WV I did indeed pronounce orange as a monosyllable, but with a more rounded vowel.
Pentameter.
My fave hyperdisyllable is extraordinarily, which one can easily manage if one is strawnly drunk.
I’m no native speaker or Shakespearean actor, but I’m with our gracious and behatted host.
Were as sev’n vials of his sacred blood
The same iambic pentameter as:
Now is the winter of our discontent
I should probably not cite what’s likely to be obsolete Victorian theorizing passed down a century later to unsuspecting Italian schoolboys; but as I was taught it, if you invert the first iamb into a trochee you still need another iamb as your second foot.
Any chance of “Were as“?
Pentameter
Giacomo Ponzetto has it exactly right. Pentameter does not mean an endless sequence of da-DUM-da-DUM-da-DUM-da-DUM-da-DUM; if it did, it wouldn’t be poetry, just doggerel. Sometimes a sequence of unstressed syllables stands in for a stressed one, just as a sequence of short syllables stands in for a long one in Greek and Latin poetry. To my ear, JC’s version sounds strained and unnatural.
I don’t believe “of” can carry stress in either example.
Nor do I see how you can make sev’n into a single unstressed syllable.
I may not understand what the arc is doing for John, but in my reading the break in da-DUM-da-DUM comes from “of his”, putting the focus on sacred as the focal point of the line.
My fave hypermonosyllable is orange, /ʌɹnd͡ʒ/.
That’s a hypermonosyllable for me, but with /ɑ/, my LOT=PALM vowel.
Why this, and not the more obvious “Wére as sev’n víals of his sácred blóod”?
That’s the prose rhythm; as in many pentameter lines, you need to promote one of the slack syllables to stress. Thus the prose rhythm of “Shall Í compáre thee to a súmmer’s dáy?” has four stresses, but in the pentameter context of Sonnet 18 (of which it is the first line) it becomes “Shall Í compáre thee tó a súmmer’s dáy?”, or alternatively “Shall Í compáre thée to a súmmer’s dáy?”, which has an ionic double-foot, one of the regular substitutions in pentameter lines.
extraordinarily
Six syllables for me (extr’ordinarily), but the full seven for many Americans.
Wére as sev’n víals óf his sácred blóod”? (using accent marks rather than boldface for uniformity)
Promoting of is pretty extreme; note that this is not the same as Hat’s version, which has no promotion.
if you invert the first iamb into a trochee you still need another iamb as your second foot
Counterexample from King Lear V:iii:
No, nó, no lífe!
Whý should a dóg, a hórse, a rát, have life,
and thóu no bréath at áll? Thou’lt cóme no móre,
néver, néver, néver, néver, néver!
The second line has a trochaic substitution in the initial position, which is the most common place, but the fourth line has five trochaic substitutions.
Any chance of “Were ás
That’s even more extreme: were is being demoted and as is being promoted, rather than a standard trochaic substitution.
======
Now sometimes Shakespeare writes lines that aren’t pentameter at all, like this from Hamlet I:i:
Stáy! Spéak, spéak! I chárge thee, spéak!
Or this dialogue from King Lear I:i:
LEAR
Here Í discláim áll my patérnal cáre,
Propínquitý and própertý of blóod,
And ás a stránger tó my héart and mé
Hold thée, from thís, for éver. The bárb’rous Scýthian,
Or hé that mákes his génerátion mésses
To górge his áppetíte, sháll to my bósom
Bé as well néighbour’d, pítied, ánd relíeved,
As thóu my sómetime dáughter.
KENT
Góod my líege —
LEAR
Péace, Ként!
Come nót betwéen the drágon ánd his wráth.
What’s happening here is that after seven lines of normal pentameter, Lear stops after the third foot of the eighth line, and Kent tries to finish the line by providing the two missing feet, as is common in dramatic verse — but Lear won’t let him; he simply eradicates Kent’s half-line with two brutal stresses and caps the resulting five-stress line:
As thóu my sómetime dáughter. Péace, Ként!
with another normal pentameter line:
Come nót betwéen the drágon ánd his wráth.
Stáy! Spéak, spéak! I chárge thee, spéak!
I believe here “speak” is disyllabic.
Compare
From Sicyon, ho, the news! Speak there! (Antony and Cleopatra, I.2)
“News” (with epenthetic vowel after the w) and “speak” are both disyllabic.
It’s pretty pyrrhic, granted, but how else do you open Richard III?
And is it more extreme than three trochees + two iambs? That sounds rather more irregular than the same trochaic word repeated five times. But I’m out of my depth.
“Pentameter does not mean an endless sequence of da-DUM-da-DUM-da-DUM-da-DUM-da-DUM; if it did, it wouldn’t be poetry, just doggerel.”
….or Russian…
I don’t believe “of” can carry stress in either example.
It can’t; that’s why I didn’t stress it.
That’s the prose rhythm; as in many pentameter lines, you need to promote one of the slack syllables to stress. Thus the prose rhythm of “Shall Í compáre thee to a súmmer’s dáy?” has four stresses, but in the pentameter context of Sonnet 18 (of which it is the first line) it becomes “Shall Í compáre thee tó a súmmer’s dáy?”, or alternatively “Shall Í compáre thée to a súmmer’s dáy?”, which has an ionic double-foot, one of the regular substitutions in pentameter lines.
Wow, you read poetry completely differently from me. I stress “Shall” in that line, and can’t imagine reading it “Shall Í” with the first word unstressed.
….or Russian…
No, Russian has a complex and subtle interplay of stress and meter; see Andrei Bely’s discussion of the subject (which was such a revelation to Nabokov).
>It can’t; that’s why I didn’t stress it.
Great. But I commented b/c GP put “of” in bold.
I still don’t believe you can demote sev’n that far, in either line. “Edward’s sev’n sons” sinks in a stuttering soup if there’s no stress on sev. It makes more audible and logical sense to compress whereof to where’v. The tidal pull of sevens is part of the rhythm of the speech as a whole.
Not to mention that demoting the first sev’n again leaves of (in whereof) with stress, along with self. But the logical focus of those syllables is on thy.
I too found JC’s stress on “I” surprising, again both metrically and logically. That would put an unexplained focus on the contrast between I and thee, as if there were some unspoken difference needed to be hinted at. “Shall I (a peon) compare thee (a noble) to a summer’s day?”
I may not understand what the arc is doing for John
It shows that of his counts as a single slack in the scansion.
“News” (with epenthetic vowel after the w) and “speak” are both disyllabic.
It’s possible, but the other occurrences of speake and newes in this play (per the First Folio, which spells them consistently) don’t support it.
It’s pretty pyrrhic, granted, but how else do you open Richard III?
In that case I agree: I don’t see anything better than “Nów is the wínter óf our díscontént. It’s not a great line. “Shakespeare never had six lines together without a fault. Perhaps you may find seven, but this does not refute my general assertion.” — Samuel Johnson
And is it more extreme than three trochees + two iambs?
Generally speaking, inversion is better than promotion, which in turn is better than demotion. Such are the results of trying to fit a Germanic language into an alien (French) metrical schema.
I stress “Shall” in that line
I’m fine with that. My point is that there are four natural (prose) stresses in that line, however you place them exactly.
I think the same of the final line. You all would make a stuttering mutter of a forceful passage, putting the stresses mostly on the filler syllables that carry no meaning. It should be read:
Édwards séven sóns, where’v thýself art óne
Wére as séven víals of his sácred blóod
Or séven fáir bránches sprínging from óne root
Richard III opens with disyllabic our:
Nów is the wínter of óur díscontént
It makes sense to put a bit of stress on the pronoun, since it’s not merely a bad season everyone. It’s a bad season for the House of York. Logic is óur friend.
That’s another clash with contrastive stress. The only alternative I can imagine to Be ás well […] As thóu, my sómetime dáughter is Be júst as well […], and that’s not what the text says.
…unless you can shuffle the words around until they fit. That’s how it’s done in German (unless you’re Goethe and can just stress the wrong words on occasion).
thýself? I’d much rather give up and give the line its six near-prose stresses. Put a dramatic pause where the comma is. How many people in the audience would notice one hexameter smuggled in among thousands of pentameters? Did Shakespeare himself notice…?
Another great candidate for Or séven fáir _ bránches || sprínging fróm one róot.
Are you sure that existed before non-rhoticity?
I’ve not yet encountered a language where stress is so well correlated with logic. Even contrastive stress falls far short of this.
(Troll hypothesis: Richard III is in elegic distichon.)
thýself?
Yeah, I find that completely impossible.
Only Peter Sellers seems to follow something like my read (stressing “our” in “winter of our discontent”), in a rendition I find particularly unsatisfying, that doesn’t even allow for bruis-ed. I think of Richard as well-spoken, if ugly and deformed, but Sellers makes him high-pitched, nasal and all-around infelicitous, with something like Yuck for York and “our ‘ouse” coming out not unlike “our arse”.
Sellers treats our as a single stressed syllable, but that gives too much emphasis, losing discontent in the outwash. As disyllabic, you can give it soft emphasis while still hitting discontent harder as the primary content word.
Most others seem to hit four beats in the line rather than putting any stress on “of”. Some elide “winter of our” to “WIN-t’ruv ar” to avoid three unstressed syllables in series. A four-foot line just seems egregious.
I don’t have the background to know the story of “our”, but wiktionary offers a middle english alternate spelling of ouwer, which suggests that the progression of unser -> user -> urre -> oure -> our always allowed for the same two-syllable version that is still available today.
I don’t understand your problem with thýself. I don’t use thyself, of course, but I can put stress on MY-self for emphasis. “Speak for yourself, and I’ll speak for MY-self.” (Editing because the yourself-myself may make this more natural, but I can still say MY-self where the phrasing is “you make your own choices, but for MYself…)
The problem with other reads is that it pretty much always sounds odd to stress “of” or “from”. These are words that get swallowed unless you want to point to them. My reads are plausible ways someone might say these things. The logical focus won’t always get metrical stress. But where the logical read is allowed, and a pedantic metrical read leads to silliness, logic is an added support for that read.
If I may be so bold, I believe actors can speak Shakespeare’s lines with a variety of stress patterns and cadences in order to convey subtleties as they and their director choose.
In Derek Jarman’s somewhat crazed but enjoyable film version of The Tempest, Miranda says “O brave new world…” with a kind of incredulous look and amused WTF tone that make the scene very funny.
OTOH, thýself doesn’t work at all, as our proprietor says.
I don’t understand your problem with thýself. I don’t use thyself, of course, but I can put stress on MY-self for emphasis
But “whereóf thysélf art óne” is perfectly natural and requires no weird stresses.
Ooh, three dactyls: Nów is the wínt’r of our díscontent! Perfect! Too bad it’s only got three stresses instead of five.
Édwards séven sóns, where’v thýself art óne
That has only nine syllables and no clear foot-structure.
Or séven fáir bránches sprínging from óne root
That has eleven syllables. And you are going to promote one and demote root to an extrametrical syllable?
Metrology is our fríend.
(I forgot to say that the above analysis of Lear vs. Kent is due to Joseph Malof.)
Nów is the wínter of óur díscontént
That has eleven syllables too, so it would require extrametrical -ent.
None of this makes any sense to me.
Metrology is our fríend.
Metrology appears to lead us into bizarre byways, so I reject it.
Perhaps you’re right. I could say it that way, but maybe I wouldn’t normally.
My primary point was about whereof. That where’v is at least as natural as whereóf, and that the proper stresses in that line are on Ed, Sev, Sons, (Thy or Self as you prefer) and One. Rather than Ed, Sons, Of, Self and One.
The biggest problem I have with your stresses is that I don’t think anyone would naturally compress the last syllable of Edward’s and the normally disyllablic seven into two syllables both unstressed. That the only reason to think it was intended that way is to allow for emphasis on -of that isn’t necessary.
In support, I’ll mention Sonnet 63, in which whereof is a trochee. From there, eliding -of into the first syllable seems trivial.
The kind of metrology I’m familiar with is done here and at similar institutions around the world. I would like to see them try to standardize poetic scansion, prosody etc.
Metrology was a brain fart: the correct term is prosody. Unfortunately, that means something different in theezum parts.
Metrology appears to lead us into bizarre byways
The fault’s in the messenger, not in the message. Anyone interested should grab Malof’s A Manual of English Meters.
BTW, Kiwi Hellenist has recently written an exposition (parts 1, 2, 3) on Homeric hexameters, and how they are taught and mistaught. It’s so clear that you hardly feel how technical and detailed it is.
“‘Feet’ are to Homeric poetry what roads are to geology. Handy for finding your way around, but nothing to do with the actual thing.”