filipendulous

If something is filipendulous, it means it’s hanging by a thread or a filament. It’s most often used to describe things that appear suspended by delicate or slender attachments, and look like they could drop at any moment. Like a spider suspended by a single thread. Or my sanity.

Like many of our words (especially the complicated ones), filipendulous comes from Latin. It’s a combination of the Latin word ‘filum’ meaning ‘thread’, and ‘pendere’ which means ‘to hang’.

You’re most likely to come across the word filipendulous in botany, where it’s used to describe plants with structures on fine stalks or threads. There’s actually a genus of plants called Filipendula containing 12 species of perennial herbaceous plants. That includes meadowsweet and dropwort, and the excellently named queen-of-the-forest (Filipendula occidentalis) and queen-of-the-prairie (Filipendula rubra), both of which are native to North America.

Filipendula species are food plants for the larvae of some Lepidoptera (AKA butterflies and moths) species, including the emperor moth, one of the biggest in the world. The largest emperor moth has a wingspan of between 15 and 20cm (6 to 8 inches). Yeesh. (I’ve literally just finished reading ‘The Travelling Bag’ by Susan Hill which makes this fact particularly freaky. If you know, you know.) These moths live in Europe, but haven’t made it across the Channel to us (YET). Having said that, our largest moth is the privet hawk moth, which can get up to a not-too-shabby 12cm (4.7in) wingspan.

You wouldn’t want either of those flapping round your bedroom light, would you?

bletting

Some fruits, particularly sloes and medlars (more on those later), can be a bit sour to eat, even when they’re ripe (due to high levels of tannins). And that’s where our word of the week comes in – to make them more edible, we blet them. This basically means letting them go past fully ripe to the point where they’re just starting to break down, but aren’t quite rotting yet. Yum.

There seems to be quite an art to bletting – let it go too long and obviously the fruit’s too minging to eat. Don’t do it enough and it’ll be too bitter to enjoy. Having said that, it’s a fairly hands-off process, and mainly involves storing fruit at room temperature then looking at it every now and again. There seems to be some poking involved as well.

Etymology-wise, we can trace ‘blet’ back to the Old English word ‘blætt’ or ‘blǣtt’, that was used to describe anything a bit squishy or soft.

Four medlars, in all their bummy glory (photo © Andrew Dunn, 1 October 2005).

One fruit that’s inedible before bletting is the medlar, which you possibly haven’t heard of. Medlars were actually very popular here in Blighty a few hundred years ago. They go back even further than that as well – the medlar tree comes from Persia, and ye olde Greeks and Romans grew them too. They possibly fell out of favour because a perfectly bletted medlar is brown and squishy to the point that you might think it’s going to collapse in your hand. Doesn’t sound terribly appetising, does it?

Medlars also aren’t the most attractive of fruits – in fact, in France they’re called ‘cul de chien’ which translates as ‘dog’s arse’. Shakespeare called them ‘open-arse’ in Romeo and Juliet (which paints a lovely picture), and DH Lawrence referred to them as ‘autumnal excrementa’ (‘autumn shit’) in his poem ‘Medlars and Sorb-Apples’. That ode starts with these delightful lines:

‘I love you, rotten,

Delicious rottenness.’

Despite all this bad press, the much-maligned medlar is making a bit of a comeback. Medlar jelly is apparently lovely with a bit of cheese, and you can buy it online. Go on, treat yourself to some autumnal poop. You know you want to.