I knew that cremini mushrooms are just younger, smaller portobello mushrooms. What I didn’t know is that cremini mushrooms are just older white button mushrooms.
Button mushroms were first cultivated centuries ago as cremini-colored. A white strain popped up in 1925 and became the more popular version. Then in the natural foods 1970s, brown creminis started taking hold again. Left to grow long enough, they become portobello.
“Austria” comes from German meaning “Eastern Realm.”
"Australia comes from Latin meaning “Southern Land.”
But in both cases, the “Aus-” ultimately derives from a PIE root meaning “dawn.”
And the word “south” ultimately derives from a PIE root meaning “sun,” which I guess ties back into “dawn.”
Help me understand how “south” relates to “dawn.”
Against the expected SDMB level of rigor, I will comment from memory without double-checking:
In temperate latitudes (e.g. The Mediterranean & much of the Middle East), the sun rises in the southeast for part of the year, most notably in the weeks leading up to/trailing after the winter solstice. The opposite is true of the summer solstice (sun rises in the northeast). And of course, on the two equinoxes the sun rises (roughly?) due east.
Here I speculate: There may have been some significance of the winter solstice south-eastern dawn to an early Mediterranean culture that pre-date the Romans (e.g. Etruscans or other contemporaries). Perhaps something of a celebration of the new year?
Aus also means “to shine” in PIE. It basically comes down to the relative geography of Italy (Latin) and Germany. In Italy, the “wind from the sun (shine)” came from the South. In Germany the shine of dawn came from the east.
While frowned upon on the SDMB, Google Gemini did a good job marshaling resources to answer @Earl_Snake-Hips_Tucker 's question. The initial prompt below is mine, with an assist from Wiktionary (for the exact Proto-Indo-European terms):
Prompt: How did “auster” in Latin come to mean “south” instead of “east” when “auster” ultimately derives from from Proto-Indo-European “*h₂éwsteros” and "*h₂ews (“dawn”)?
Google Gemini response: The exact mechanism for how Latin’s auster shifted from a root meaning “dawn” to mean “south” is a classic linguistic debate. The shift is generally attributed to the Romans’ Mediterranean perspective and the geographical quirks of the Italian peninsula.
The transition likely happened through one of two main theories:
The Italian Peninsula Axis Theory: Indo-European languages often associated direction with the rising sun. However, because the Italian peninsula leans diagonally from northwest to southeast, a dawn (or eastern) wind could be perceived as blowing from the southeast. Over time, this southeastern directional association gradually migrated to strictly signify “south”.
The “Burning” Heat Theory: The Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root *h₂ews- (to shine) is related to words for “burning” or “glowing” . The Romans heavily associated auster with the hot, dry, and often hazy winds blowing up from North Africa (the sirocco). The concept of “burning” was metaphorically transferred to the “hot” wind and the cardinal direction it came from .
Well, cool.
Thank you for this! I enjoy marmalade but can only get Smuckers, which is basically orange sugar-gel.
Les a “fact” and more a coincidence. I noticed that the map of the current/ upcoming heat wave…
…looks awfully similar to the range of the red-bellied woodpecker:
I note that the woodpecker ranges into Canada while the weather stops at the border.
(But it’s probably not a coincidence: the features that lend themselves to this weather pattern probably have other impacts on the geography that affect the bird’s range.)
Missouri is the only state to manufacture corn-cob pipes
I just learned from the YouTube channel Tasting History that the practice of dying cheese orange actually started in England. It came across the pond with the colonists, and while the practice mostly died out in England it continued in America.
Specifically, certain breeds of cow, such as Jersey, will produce dark colored milk naturally, especially in early spring when they’ve been eating lots of fresh grass. This milk was highly prized for making butter and cheese, and cheese made from it would be naturally orange colored (an interesting fact unto itself). Then some less scrupulous cheesemakers realized they could make more money by just selling the cream, and added saffron* or annatto to lesser milk to make cheese that looked like the expensive stuff. And that became a thing in England for quite a while, and as I said in the previous paragraph American cheesemakers just never stopped adding coloring after the practice died out in England.
So whenever some British person mentions how weird our orange American cheese** looks, you can tell them that they’re the ones who started it.
*Which seems like it would be just as expensive as the fancy milk given how expensive saffron is, but I guess maybe the fancy milk was really expensive, and it doesn’t take all that much saffron to give something that yellow color.
**As in cheese from America, not the processed stuff called “American cheese”, although that is orange as well.
British people know cheese can be dyed (if they ever read the labels at least); the UK has a lot of coloured cheeses- like red Leicester, which is dyed really dark orange with annatto. That’s a very common cheese in the UK, I have some in the fridge right now.
It’s just that most of our cheese isn’t like that, we just have a few types that are orange- and I think typically a darker colour- so it seems weird to have, say, cheddar, which is a different colour to what we’re expecting, and to be unable to pick out the types by colour. You can get dyed ‘red cheddar’ in the UK, but it’s regional and not the same shade.
You can still (largely) pick out cheese types by color in the US; it’s just that the colors will be different than they would be in England. Like, here in the US, if you see a white cheese, it probably isn’t cheddar (but it might be, say, provolone).
We always buy the white cheddar (Canada): we get both options here. “Extra old” is white, but mild, medium, and old are orange.
English cheesemakers were on a par with English bakers who added chalk to bread. Which is why traditional English cheeses are “hard” cheeses: the idea was to extract all the fat for other uses, and sell cheese made from the left-overs. English cheese suffered a significant market loss when people started importing Continental cheeses, because some people did not prefer cheap dry hard cheese.
The States’ Rights Democrat Party, always referred to as the Dixiecrats, won four states in the 1948 presidential election. People talk about how they defeated Truman in those states. But they didn’t. The states - Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina - decided that the Dixiecrats were the “real” Democratic Party and kept Truman’s name off the ballots.
I believe this is the only time since the Civil War that the President’s party didn’t appear on a state ballot in a presidential election.
I assume Strom Thurmond won all of the electoral votes in those state. At the time, most Southerners still couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a ("Party of Lincoln) Republican candidate. And, of course, thanks to literacy tests and poll taxes black and poor people couldn’t vote at all.
He certainly did. The idea was that in what was expected to be a close election, he could peel off sufficient electoral votes to deny Truman a majority and throw the election into the House. There the Southern states would support the Republicans, since they were already leaning toward white supremacy, and the coalition would smother the rising civil rights movement. Thurmond would later have his revenge, to be sure, and was the first major name to join the Republican party as the world turned upside down.
Strom Thurmond advocated for all sorts of racial discrimination. This includes no marriage or any kind of sex between whites and blacks. This didn’t stop him from having an affair with an underage black woman. She had a baby girl with Thurmond. He supported this daughter financially until she was an adult but hid the fact that she was his daughter for all his life.
It wasn’t an “affair”. She was a domestic worker in his parent’s home and he raped her. Also, he provided the daughter with occasional help here and there. He hardly supported her.
