We all like them. In fact, they grow more popular every year. The numbers back this up — avocados will be a nearly 20 billion dollar industry by 2025. Unlike many things in our modern lives, to cut into an avocado is an uncertain act. Will it be perfectly green, ripe and ready to eat? Or will it be brown and rotten, or perhaps not ripe enough? It’s a picky fruit. It only tastes amazing at peak ripeness, and ith a bit of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper, it may be the perfect snack.
Some history of the avocado might help to rough in the history of this popular fruit. Avocados have been cultivated in Central and South America since 5,000 BC and it is probably originally from the Tehuacan Valley in the modern Mexican state of Pueblo.
The oldest discovery of an avocado pit comes from Coxcatlan Cave in the same valley, dating from around 9,000 to 10,000 years ago. Other caves in the Tehuacan have also provided early evidence for the presence and consumption of avocado. Outside of Mexico, there is evidence of avocado consumption at Norte Chico civilization sites in Peru that are 3,200 years old and at Caballo Muerto in Peru from around 4,500 years ago. All this to say, humans have been dependent on the avocado’s calorie richness (up to 350 calories per fruit) and creamy taste for a very, very long time, which makes all those early 2000s jokes about avocado toast being the new thing feel pretty short sighted.
The word for avocado has its root in the Aztec language known as Nahuatl — ahuacatl — and also means “testicle” in the language. Aside from the similar shape between the two objects, some people — Nahuatl shamans amongst them — believe that avocados act as aphrodisiacs, which could explain why the two things share a common word.
From its original and somewhat sexual original Nahuatl, this fruit’s name in the West has taken a somewhat meandering road. This helps explain why the Spanish word for avocado — aguacate — sounds so similar to the Spanish word for lawyer or advocate — abagado. This similarity is thought to be influenced by the folk etymology (the way people actually use words) of earlier Spanish when the Spanish colonialists became aware of the fruit and its name through colonizing in the Americas.
Usually, when a novel word comes into a language from an outside culture, the speakers will associate it with an already used word in their language that sounds similar — a phenomenon known as loanword adaptation — or just make the new word sound phonetically similar to their language — such as the French word for coffee — café — turning into coffee in English. The English word avocado emerged from the the Spanish in the late 17th century. The first mention of this new word in print is from 1697 as “avogato pear”, a term which was later corrupted as “alligator pear” because “avogato” seemingly reminded English speakers at the time of the word “alligator.” Interestingly, Dutch still maintains the “pear” part of the word — using advocaatpeer.
So our modern “avocado” is not from the original Nahuatl, even though the pronunciation of the Nahuatl word is more similar to the English pronunciation than the Spanish word is.
One last note before I go and actually eat an avocado: Because of the way the language’s syntax worked, Nahuatl speakers could create compound words, sort of like in German. Freundschaftsbeziehungen, anyone? (That means “demonstrations of friendship” by the way.) One such Nahuatl compound word was ahuacamolli, meaning avocado soup or sauce, from which the Spanish word “guacamole” derives, a word now also loaned into English and widely used.
Next up is “assassin,” a word that’s as intriguing as it sounds. Subscribe here on Substack and on Instagram if you’d like.