Explosive Fruit

Checking my blog visitor log the other day, I saw that someone had used Google’s translation service to read it in French. The phrase “originally published in The Pomegranate” had been translated as “? l’origine ?dit?es dans la grenade.”

“La grenade” . . . of course! The Engish word “pomegranate” comes from the Old French pom grenate. That connection trickled into my consciousness after a moment’s thought. (Hence “grenadine,” the syrup made from pomegranates or currants.)

But I still enjoyed the metaphorical possibilities: our journal–which is now at the printer–as a grenade tossed into seminar room of religious studies. It sounds like a poetic image by one of the more violent Futurists of the 1930s.

In early 20th-century American slang, small bombs thrown by hand or launched by a rifle have been called “pineapples” (cast iron fragmentation-style) or “lemons” (sheet metal fragmentation-style) — but not, so far as I know, “pomegranates.”