fuchsia

Fuchsia blossoms dangle elegantly, in a way that suggests the kind of impossible plant you might see on some alien world. (Go on, take a look in case you don’t know what I’m talking about.) I’ve always thought this, and I’ve also always thought the word itself was beautiful. I couldn’t tell you if I think this just because I like the flowers so much or if, separate from the flowers themselves, the word itself is inherently beautiful, in the way some people think the phrase cellar door is. Whatever the story there, the word fuchsia names both this plant and high-octane magenta you see in the flowers. But I would guess that most people would be surprised to learn how we got this word: In 1703, French botanist Charles Plumier “discovered” the plant on Hispaniola and named it after the German botanist Leonhard Fuchs — whose name isn’t pronounced “fucks,” exactly, but the vowel is allegedly close the vowel in the English word push, so somewhere between “fucks” and “fooks,” I guess? Fuchs’ last name is also the German word for “fox,” so I suppose the fuchsia is as much the fox flower as it is the fucks flower. 

Two extra little bits here. First, the Fox Broadcasting Company is named for William Fox, a Hungarian-American man who changed his name from Wilhelm Fuchs. Second, fuchsia is unrelated to another inherently funny color word, fucus, a red pigment derived from algae of the same name. Because it was sometimes used as rogue or in other forms of make-up, it gave English the adjective fucate, “artificially colored” and, by extension, “false, counterfeit.” The word is now obsolete, though the mode of thinking that would link cosmetics with fraud is unfortunately not.