Cherry

It’s Cherry Festival time again in Traverse City, and what started as a modest tribute to the cherry industry decades ago has burgeoned into a fullscale festival. The community is anxious to learn what a shrinking dollar and intolerably high gas prices will do to tourism. At any rate, the idea of cherry is buried deep within some words like a fruit pit.

• amarine, bitter or sour, derives from the morello cherry (L. amarina)
• cerasin is the insoluble portion of the gum which exudes from the cherry and other trees (L. cerasus, cherry tree).
• cerise is the name of a light, bright cherry-red color.
• cornel is the English name for cornouille, the Cornelian Cherry or Long Cherry.
• cornelian is a variety of chalcedony, a semi-transparent quartz, of a deep dull red, flesh, or reddish white color.
• goynire is an obsolete word for a small kind of cherry (OF guinier)
• kirshwasser is an alcoholic spirit distilled in Germany and Switzerland from a fermented liquor obtained by crushing wild cherries (Ger. kirsche, cherry + wasser, water).
• marasca is a small black Dalmatian cherry grown for the distilling of maraschino (L. amarus, bitter?).
• merise is a small bitter black cherry (blend of amer, bitter, and cerise, cherry).
• visney is a liqueur of the nature of cherry brandy (Pers. wishneh, cherry).


SIDEBAR: 2008 National Cherry Festival


Now available from McFarland & Co.: Word Parts Dictionary, 2nd edition

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