Get Hip

Day 354: I may have mentioned my love of words somewhere along the line in these posts, and indeed etymology runs right alongside botany in the race for which science I most enjoy. The two feed off each other, so to speak, additions to my lexicon from the descriptive vocabulary of botany always welcome and generally sending me on a hunt for roots of a verbal nature even as I admire the hispidulous foliage of a plant or the obdiplostemonous beauty of its flowers. Okay, most of you won't even try to wrap your lips around all those syllables (and frankly, neither will I unless the need arises), so here's a simpler word for you: hip.

Every autumn, the question arises in my mind again: why "hip" for the false fruit of the rose? Invariably, by the time I've returned to the house, I've forgotten that I intended to look up the origin of the vernacular term, so I took a photo to remind me while out on my Manke Mt. hike. It turns out that the word comes from an entirely different root than "hip" as it applies to the body or to roof construction. In fact, it derives from Old English "heope," a bramble, itself drawn from the deeper well of Scandinavian languages. On the other hand, the Old English word "hype" gives us our physical hips, mutating through "hepe" and "hippe" to arrive at its present angular form. You might wish to gather the "heope" for vitamin-C rich tea as people hip/hep to its benefits may do (be warned that too much may cause kidney issues), but that "hip" (becoming wise to something) unfortunately leads down an etymological blind alley. You can't have everything.