Orchid (pronounced awr-kid)
(1) Any
terrestrial or epiphytic plant of the family Orchidaceae, often having flowers
of unusual shapes and beautiful colors, specialized for pollination by certain
insects and associated with of temperate and tropical regions.
(2) The
flower(s) of any of these plants.
(3) A
bluish to reddish purple.
1845: It
was English botanist John Lindley (1799–1865) who in School Botanty (1845) coined the word orchid from the New Latin Orchideæ & Orchidaceae (Linnaeus),
the plant's family name, from the Latin orchis
(a kind of orchid), from the Ancient Greek orkhis (genitive orkheos)
(orchid, literally "testicle") from the primitive Indo-European orghi-, the standard root for "testicle"
(and related to the Avestan erezi (testicles),
the Armenian orjik, the Middle Irish uirgge, the Irish uirge (testicle) and the Lithuanian erzilas (stallion). The
plant so called because of the shape of its root was said so to resemble testicles. The earlier English (in Latin form) was orchis (1560s) and in the thirteenth
century Middle English it was ballockwort
(literally “testicle plant” and source of the more recent ballocks). The extraneous -d- was added in an attempt to
extract the Latin stem. The construct was
orch(is) (a plant) + -idae. The noun plural is orchids, the field is called orchidology and an obsessive is called an orchidologist.
The irregular
suffix –idae is the plural of a Latin
transliteration of the Ancient Greek -ίδης (-ídēs), a patronymic suffix. In Medieval writing, it was sometimes interpreted
as representing instead the plural of a Latin transliteration of the Ancient
Greek adjectival suffix -ειδής (-eidḗs) from εἶδος (eîdos) (appearance, resemblance). It was adopted in 1811 at the suggestion of British
entomologist William Kirby (1759-1850), to simplify and make uniform the system
of French zoologist Pierre André Latreille (1762–1833) which divided insect
orders into sections; in taxonomy, it’s used to form names of subclasses of
plants and families of animals.
Plant
porn
The
lure of the orchid seems to attract a certain sort of obsessive, drawn by the beauty
of the flowers and their sensual fragrance, they speak of its blatant sexuality
and leaf slowly through the specialized catalogues which, to them, is botanical
pornography. It’s also a business and a cut-throat one, the retail value of the
trade is estimated at US$9 billion annually and, with some of the plant’s natural
habitats under threat, the rarest are becoming more expensive. Governments and quangos have become involved
too, imposing regulations and limits on harvesting, the Geneva-based CITES (Convention
on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) rumored
to be threatening even to seek the power to raid the private greenhouses of amateur
collectors who may have violated their rules. The idea of squads of international bureaucrats, escorted by police, turning up outside the potting shed and demanding to inspect the plants may sound Kafkaesque but according to some lawyers, there are international treaties, if ratified and recognized in domestic law, which might permit exactly that. It's of particular interest in countries with a federal constitutional arrangement in which sub-national governments (states & provinces etc) guarantee certain protection. In those systems, (1) international treaties are sometimes entered into by national governments which tend to be vested with the head of power encompassing foreign affairs and (2) federal constitutions usually provide that when any conflict exists between national and sub-national laws, the former shall prevail.
A Lindsay Lohan selfie with orchid, October, 2014.
Useful
introductions to the weird world of the orchid-obsessed include The
Orchid Thief (2000) by Susan Orlean. Orchid:
A Cultural History (2016) by Jim Endersby and Orchid Fever: A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust, and Lunacy (2000)
by Eric Hansen. Photographs can only hint at their sensual beauty but the obsessed differ on the best way to experience orchids, some saying nothing compares to their natural environment while others like to mix with them en masse, in a humid hothouse with sufficient air-flow to make them happy and permit the scent of the flowers to waft about.
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