DE BANANA
The title which heads this paper is intended to be Latin, and is
modelled on the precedent of the De Amicitia, De Senectute, De Corona,
and other time-honoured plagues of our innocent boyhood. It is meant to
give dignity and authority to the subject with which it deals, as well
as to rouse curiosity in the ingenuous breast of the candid reader, who
may perhaps mistake it, at first sight, for negro-English, or for the
name of a distinguished Norman family. In anticipation of the possible
objection that the word 'Banana' is not strictly classical, I would
humbly urge the precept and example of my old friend Horace--enemy I
once thought him--who expresses his approbation of those happy
innovations whereby Latium was gradually enriched with a copious
vocabulary. I maintain that if Banana, bananae, &c., is not already a
Latin noun of the first declension, why then it ought to be, and it
shall be in future. Linnaeus indeed thought otherwise. He too assigned
the plant and fruit to the first declension, but handed it over to none
other than our earliest acquaintance in the Latin language, Musa. He
called the banana _Musa sapientum_. What connection he could possibly
conceive between that woolly fruit and the daughters of the aegis-bearing
Zeus, or why he should consider it a proof of wisdom to eat a
particularly indigestible and nightmare-begetting food-stuff, passes my
humble comprehension. The muses, so far as I have personally noticed
their habits, always greatly prefer the grape to the banana, and wise
men shun the one at least as sedulously as they avoid the other.
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