You say tomato, I say Germany

Or, why don’t we call things what they really are?

Maybe there’s something in the air (PM 2.5!), or maybe it’s the result of dining together nearly every night for over six months (COVID-19!), but lately my husband and I have been having some particularly enlightening conversations around the dinner table.

It started with a singular peak summer salad: sliced snap peas, quartered tomatoes, chunks of avocado, kernels of corn, and coins of cucumber. Our curiosity about the components of this meal led us down a happy rabbit hole, as we began systematically dismantling the fruit/vegetable binary.

It turns out that a vegetable is defined by being any part of the plant that isn’t a fruit. And that a fruit is defined as being the part of a plant that disseminates seeds. And it turns out that our bowl full of beautiful summer vegetables, was technically a fruit salad.

Like in James Loewen’s book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, there are certain things we generally accept as fact that are based not in truth, but rather in oversimplification and a desire to avoid ambiguity (or controversy).

We see this a lot in naming, too—certain myths are held to be self-evident, when in fact a deeper examination reveals how easy it is to refute them. Things like, a name needs to be short in order to be memorable. Or, a name needs to have an immediate association with what a company does or what a product is. Of course, no one ever forgets the name A Hundred Monkeys (and it doesn’t have any immediate connection to naming or messaging).

Our latest dinner table conversation taught us some new vocabulary words: exonym and endonym. We were curious to know why we call certain countries by names that are different from what the people who actually live in that country would say. Why do we call it Germany, while citizens of that fair terrain call it Deutschland? It actually goes much deeper than we even realized—there are in fact six categories of different names for that country.

All languages contain exonyms and endonyms, either for historo-geographical reasons, or because of difficulties with pronunciation.

Another thing we say around here a lot is: Names are living, breathing things. Like our understanding of history, botany, and borders, they have the ability to change over time. So, call it Germany if you wish. But I also won’t bat a lash if you call it Deutschland.