8天攻克英语六级8000词汇(六)

　　ORCHID
　　The lovely and expensive orchid holds in its name the Greek word for “testicle,” orchis. Even Pliny the Elder, Roman author and naturalist, said,these 2,000 years ago, that the orchid was remarkable in that, with its double roots, it resembles the testicles. These are his Latin words:” Mirabilis est orchis herba, sive serapias, gemina radice testiculis simili.” The word orchis now survives in English only as a botanical and medical term. The meaning proper has disappeared along with the study of Greek from the general ken.
　　PANSY
　　Some poetic mind fancied that this dainty flower had a thoughtful face, and so named it pensee, French for “thoughtful,” which turned easily into our word pansy.
　　PASSION FLOWER
　　So named because its parts resemble the instruments of Christ’s passion. The corona is the crown of thorns; the flower, the nails or wounds. The five sepals and five petals are the ten apostles. Peter and Judas were not counted.
　　PEONY
　　These striking, heavy-headed plants so characteristic of early summer wereonce widely used in medicine so they were named after Paion, a personage of Greek mythology who was the physician of the gods.
　　PETUNIA
　　The botanists saw a resemblance between this small tropical plant with its white and violet flowers and the tobacco plant so they took the American Indian word petun, “tobacco,” and put a Latin sounding ”ia” on the end.
　　PHILODENDRON
　　A tropical Amirican plant that likes to climb trees, among other things, and so takes its name from the Greek philodendros, from philos, “loving,” and dendron, ”tree,” that is, a “tree-loving plant.”
　　PHLOX
　　The solid and variegated colors of the phlox glow like flames. Why shouldn’t they, since phlox, in Greek, means “flame”?
　　POINSETTIA
　　The Honorable Joel Roberts Poinsett of Charleston, South Carolina, was adistinguished diplomat, Secretary of War in President Martin Van Buren’s cabinet, author, congressman, authority on military science, Union leader in the Civil War, but for all that he would probably gave been forgotten had he not been appointed as a special minister to Mexico. It was while there that he became attracted to the large, flaming flowers that we now know so well. He brought some of the plants back to the States and his name Poinsett gave us poinsettia.
　　RHODODENDRON
　　A rose tree,from the Greek rhodon, “rose,” and dendron, ”tree.”
　　SALVIA
　　The oldsters knew something of the mystical healing powers of sage tea. This idea is contained in the Latin name salvia, which is from salvus, meaning “sound” or “in good health.” In Old French this same Latin word became sauge which eventually gave us sage. But the scarlet variety of sage is an ornamentai plant, and it retains its stylish Latin name of salvia.
　　SCABIOSA
　　A thoroughly unromantic Latin name, a derivation of scabies , “the itch,” from scabo, ”scratch,” which is what you do when you have the itch. The plant was called this because it used to be thought of as a cure for certain skin diseases.
　　SHAMROCK
　　From the Irish seamrog, the diminutive of seamar which means “clover.” Therefore the shamrock is a “little clover.” The plant was used by St.Patrick to illustrate the Trinity because of its three leaves, and it became his symbol. It is for this reason that it comes in order on St.Patrick ’s day “to drown the shamrock” by way of a drinking celebration.
　　SYRINGA
　　This ornamental shrub with its sweet-scented white flowers got its name from the Greek syrinx, syringes, which meant “reed.” This name is said to have been chosen because the stems of the plant were used a good deal in the manufacture of pipes.
　　TRILLIUM
　　This flower of many colors with its whorl of three green leaves derives its name from the Latin tri-, which means “three.”
　　TULIP
　　Again among the descriptive names is the tulip which, with its showy colors and velvet texture, has somewhat the appearance of a turban. The word comes to us through the obsolete French word tulipan, from tulbend, the Turkish way of saying”turban.”
　　VERBENA
　　To us the verbena is a fragrant perennial with spikes of broad flat clusters of white, red, and lilac flowers, but to the Romans the word verbena meant “sacred bough” and applied to the sacred boughs of myrtle, cypress, and what-not carried by the heralds who declared war, demanded redress for wrongs, grievances, and all.
　　WISTERIA
　　A high-climbing shrub with flowers that run the gamut of white, pink, and violet, a plant that is especially popular in Japan and in the southern United States. It also grows in the northern states, but southerners usually refuse to recognize this fact. These flowers were named wisteria in 1818 for Caspar Wistar who was one-time professor of “anatomy, midwifery, and surgery” at what was then the College of Pennsylvania.
　　ZINNIA
　　A plant, with striking, highly colored, but rather coarse blooms. Native toMexico and the Southwest, but for some reason adopted as the state flower of Indiana. The name zinnia comes from that of J.G.Zinn, an obscure 18th-century German botanist who seems to have no other claim to fame than this.