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How did a mistranslation name a tree?

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Musician-poets in ancient Greece are frequently depicted with a kithara or cithara, a lyre carried on the arm. The words that went with the music were lyrical poems or lyrics. The Romans adopted the lyre calling it a fides; a small lyre was a fidicula, a term they also used for a "torture rack". (One can imagine a melbrooksian history-of-the-world farce especially when one considers that fides also meant trust, faith, and reliance.)

The Middle Ages saw a plethora of stringed instruments variously called violls, voyalls, violas, viulas, vielles, fitheres, vidulas, fidulas, fidels, fiddles, and a host of other cognates (words related by sound and similar meaning). Sometimes the same instrument had several names; sometimes different instruments had the same name.

Perhaps Barbados was too much a "Fiddler's green" (place of frolic)
for the sailors. Barbados Photographic Print
Buy Photographic Print at AllPosters.com

The vitula jocosa or "merry viol" is thought to have derived from vitulari or "celebrate a festival", "keep a holiday". Vitulari in turn derived from vitulus or calf. It is proposed that it all derived from when "celebrating a festival" meant "sacrificing a calf".

Jumping forward a few centuries (1690s) and across the Atlantic (Barbados), a small tree with hard and durable wood made for good repairs and tools. The French called it bois fidèle "faithful tree", an allusion to the durability of items made from the wood. But the French name was mistranslated into English as fiddletree or fiddlewood. There were even stories, none proven, that natives or slaves made fiddles from the wood. Perhaps Barbados was too much a "Fiddler's green" (place of frolic) for the sailors.

Linnaeus officially named the tree in his Species Plantarum in 1753. Since fiddles did not exist in either Rome or Greece, Linnaeus took the name to the closest related stringed instrument, the cithara. Xylem (xylum) is a direct translation of wood. Hence, the fiddlewood became Citharexylum spinosum or the "fiddlewood bearing thorns". (Compiled from: Century Unabridged Dictionary, 1889 and Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, Eric Partridge, Greenwich House, 1983)

The Institute for Systematic Botany, University of South Florida has two photographs of fiddlewood, Citharexylum spinosum. To view the photographs, click on the link:

http://www.plantatlas.usf.edu/main.asp?plantID=2182

Click on the Images tab, then on the thumbnails to enlarge the images.

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Wollemi Pine

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Previously known only from fossil records, it was presumed extinct until a single tree was found in the Wollemi National Park, Australia, in 1994. Subsequent research discovered 100 adult trees that have survived in a single canyon in this wild and rugged area. Click here to view canyon, trees and fossil record.

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