[lucywil]

my daughter just came home from school for her lunch, she was 15 on saturday and she is quite intelligent,no she is very intelligent, but every now and again she comes out with some thing i expect her 3 year old brother to say.  on a shopping trip this morning i bought some straw, she saw this and asked what it was for and i told her that it was for the strawberries to keep the fruit of the floor, she looked quite serious while asking 'is that why they are called strawberries?' i laughed (quite a lot). but it did make me wonder, why are they called strawberries? does anybody know? or indeed care?!!

[dawninspain]

Lucywil, I found this on Wikipedia:

 Etymology
The name is derived from Old English strēawberiġe which is a compound of streaw meaning "straw" and berige meaning "berry". The reason for this is unclear. It may derive from the strawlike appearance of the runners, or from an obsolete denotation of straw, meaning "chaff", referring to the scattered appearance of the achenes.

Interestingly, in other Germanic countries there is a tradition of collecting wild strawberries by threading them on straws. In those countries people find straw-berry to be an easy word to learn considering their association with straws.

There is ternative theory that the name derives from the Anglo-Saxon verb for "strew" (meaning to spread around) which was streabergen (Strea means "strew" and Bergen means "berry" or "fruit") and thence to streberie, straiberie, strauberie, straubery, strauberry, and finally, "strawberry", the word which we use today. The name might have come from the fact that the fruit and various runners appear "strewn" along the ground.

Popular etymology has it that it comes from gardeners' practice of mulching strawberries with straw to protect the fruits from rot (a pseudoetymology that can be found in non-linguistic sources such as the Old Farmer's Almanac 2005). However, there is no evidence that the Anglo-Saxons ever grew strawberries, and even less that they knew of this practice.


 

So now we know! Where would we be without the curiosity of youth  :?

Dawn

[lucywil]

wow, thanks for that, the more i laughed at her the more i thought she might be right!!

[mkhenry]

And theres me thinking that they are called that because the ones sold off season taste like and would better used as straw :?