I love radishes; they look so perfect, they taste so good, peppery and hot, and I love the combination of colours, that shade of red, and that shade of green leaves. When I was studying French i came across the fact that French people eat radishes with butter. This perplexed me; how could you eat a cold vegetable with butter? Did you spread it on the radish? Did you have some bread and spread the butter on the bread and then eat it with the radish? I still don’t know!
I came across an article about radishes, and the origin of the name; ‘radish’ may come from the Latin word ‘radix’ meaning root, and certainly radical does suggest going back to the root or origin of something. However, radical these days has a mi=uch more ominous meaning, applied to terrorists and extremists for example. Radical can also mean far-reaching, and reforming, by going back to the original idea of whatever it was.
But maybe radish had a different origin; it may have been a Latin word, one of few, which became Anglo-Saxonised, but maybe it came from French or Provençal. The connection between radical and radish seems to have been made in other languages too, as the article comments: ‘there is a term “radish communist” – said to have been used by both Trotsky and Stalin – for someone who espouses communism without believing in it’. There are other analogies used today to apply to people of one culture who try to pretend to be something else, but for Trotsky and Stalin ‘red outside, white inside, like a radish – but perhaps not radical’.
My lovely featured image is from:
http://”Remscheid Lüttringhausen – Bauernmarkt 18 ies” by Frank Vincentz – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons.
The article I mentioned can be found here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-33562261
Lois Elsden 
