March 4, 2001 New York Times Magazine

On Language: Save the Prunes

By WILLIAM SAFIRE

Has prune become a dirty word? The California Dried Plum Board, formerly the California Prune Board, is in the midst of a campaign to change the age-old name of its product.

"Unfortunately, the stereotype among the women that we're targeting," says Richard Peterson, executive director of the former prune association, "is of a medicinal food for their parents, rather than a healthful, nutritious food for women who are leading an active lifestyle." (He means "an active life." And "medicinal food" avoids the word laxative.)

Urged on by Sunsweet, which has been stewing about the way the word's connotation has been harming its black-wrinkled-fruit market, the United States government is going along with the language manipulators. The Food and Drug Administration noted that the anti-prune-name lobby promised to "coordinate a unified transition of product names, beginning with dual labeling that would include both names (prunes and dried plums) on labels to educate consumers who do not know that prunes are a type of dried plum."

To protect those consumers ignorant of prune-plum nomenclature, Christine Lewis, the labeling official in the F.D.A.'s Center for Food Safety, wrote last year that she would hold the then-Prune Board to its pledge to "track consumer awareness of the fact that dried plums are, in fact, prunes."

After the consumer has been force-fed the change for two years, the word prunes -- even the poetic alliteration pitted prunes -- will disappear forever.

But our fact-driven labeling czar is no pushover: "We do not concur," she wrote, "with the alternate name 'dried plums' used on other foods such as prune juice, canned prunes and prune butters." Perhaps that is because the term dried plum juice is a contradiction in terms too grotesque for even the federal government.

In last year's supplemented application to the F.D.A., the then-Prune Board noted precedents in the changing names of foods: the kiwi fruit, for example, never got off the ground when known as "the Chinese gooseberry"; hazelnuts used to be called "filberts." The garbanzo bean, with its romantic Spanish heritage, is shoving aside the familiar term "chickpea," while the wiener or frankfurter is better known and hawked in the United States as the "hot dog." But those were rooted in regional or dialectical differences, not deliberate attempts to impose linguistic change.

"Prunes by any other name would taste the same," wrote the A.P. farm reporter Philip Brasher, alluding to the Shakespearean Juliet's rose, "but they might sell better." The then-Prune Board might make its case about the name's negative connotation by citing a line in "Henry IV, Part 2": "He lives upon mouldy stewed prunes."

On the other hand, in direct rebuttal to the mouldy market research about the antipathies of young women to plums in their dried state, Pompey in "Measure for Measure" says: "Sir, she came in, great with child, and longing . . . for stewed prunes. Mistress Elbow . . . being great-bellied, and longing, as I said, for prunes. . . . " This proves that pregnant women -- making up a market not to go untargeted -- have been drawn to prunes for at least four centuries.

That is not to overlook the wrinkle problem. Prunes are undeniably associated with wrinkles, which we can call "character lines" all we like, but nobody wants to look like the old Dick Tracy character Pruneface. In a review of "Once Bitten," a 1985 spoof of vampire films, The Seattle Times wrote of the character played by Lauren Hutton, "She'll turn into an old prune if she doesn't get a transfusion of virgin blood soon."

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), March 04, 2001

Answers

March 4, 2001

On Language: Save the Prunes

(Page 2 of 2)

Accordingly, the industry can ask: if apricots, when dried, can be called dried apricots, why can't plums, when similarly freed of moisture, be called dried plums? The etymological response: the plum grows on a tree named the Prunus domestica. The root of that roundish fleshy drupe we call a plum is the Latin prunum. We've been calling a prune a prune since 1345, and the name is sure to outlast the California Dried Plum Board, if not the name California itself.

Not everyone in that power-deprived state is targeting the language. I asked the California Raisin Marketing Board if the raisin growers will soon petition the Food and Drug Administration for permission to label their product "dried grapes."

"Never!" shot back Judy Hirigoyen, director of marketing for the raisin combine. "We think it's cool to have wrinkles."

OPERATION PROCEED

When the governor of Massachusetts, Paul Cellucci, is confirmed as our ambassador to Canada, Lt. Gov. Jane Swift will become our first pregnant acting governor. "And although no governor has ever given birth before," wrote the New York Times columnist Gail Collins, "plenty of them take to their beds for one reason or another. Mr. Cellucci himself underwent heart surgery while in office. 'We like to call it a procedure,' said an aide." Ms. Collins noted wryly that Jane Swift "is expecting a procedure in June."

That spotted and skewered a rising euphemism. When do you have an operation, when a procedure, and how is each different from having surgery?

LaSalle Leffall Jr., M.D., professor of surgery at Howard University Hospital, says: "Every operation is a procedure, but not every procedure is an operation. A colonoscopy, for example, is a procedure and not an operation.

"You can say 'a surgical procedure,"' Dr. Leffall continues, "but it would be redundant to say 'a surgical operation.' But surgery is a discipline of using manual means for diagnosis and treatment. I'd never say, 'He had surgery."'

Claude H. Organ Jr., M.D., a surgeon and editor of the A.M.A.'s Archives of Surgery, agrees that "the word that a lot of people are using today that is not appropriate is surgeries." But he uses operation and procedure interchangeably, as does George McGee, M.D., who adds, "in general, if it requires an incision, then it would be called an operation."

Eric Rose, M.D., chairman of surgery at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, uses a nice metaphor to illustrate the difference: "If a procedure is a melody, then an operation is a symphony. A lot of component procedures make up an operation."

An operation is a surgical procedure. Patients who call operations procedures without the surgical modifying it are the sort who sit up in bed afterward and ask for a dish of stewed dried plums.

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), March 04, 2001.

Jane & prunes. Yeah, that works.

-- Carlos (riffraff@cybertime.net), March 04, 2001.

Prunes, hmmmmmm, prune stew, prune juice, prune potty, prune pudding, prune pooey.

Yeah the last one.

-- sumer (shh@aol.con), March 04, 2001.

Likewise, raisin = dried grape, jerky = dried beef, crone = dried female

-- (nemesis@awol.com), March 04, 2001.