Vocabulary for the Triply Stuffed

Probably the last concept some of you would want to think about the morning after Thanksgiving, yet a timely new word nonetheless:

cherpumple (chur-PUM-pul) — noun: a pastry desert consisting of a layer of cherry pie, a layer of pumpkin pie and an a layer of apple pie.

Etymology not necessary, or so I’d like to think. It goes without saying that, at least verbally and seasonally, cherpumple is the dessert equivalent of turducken, that other Greek mythology monster of a dish that mashes three types of poultry into a single form. No, the apple component isn’t enclosed by the pumpkin component and the pumpkin not by the cherry, but you have to admit that the comparison still works. I learned about this fascinating, horrifying item on Fritinancy, a great blog for all things verbal, on which the item was actually described as being even more fattening: cherry layer inside white cake, apple layer inside yellow cake, pumpkin layer inside spice cake, with all three stories wrapped in cream cheese frosting.

There’s even a picture, courtesy of the blog This Is Why You’re Fat:

Both the recipe and the name seemed to have been invented by Charles Phoenix, a SoCal personality who I first learned about on Tharpe-Tharpe’s blog from his guided tours of downtown Los Angeles. He even released a video explaining the creation of this Frankencake, which he boasted to the Wall Street Journal “puts the kitsch in kitchen.”

As if that weren’t enough to process after your yearly late-November gorging, I’ll give you one more: Fritinancy revealed to me the existence of what is essentially turducken + 1, an even more intimidating entity known as turbaconducken.

Previous strange and wonderful words:

• acné excoriée des jeunes filles, adulterine, ageusia, ambeer, anosmia
• barrack, bissextile, bloofer, breastsummer
• catholicon, cecaelia, couvade, cranberry morpheme, crwth, cummingtonite
• deasil, decussate, deuteragonist, dingle
• eidolon, epeolatry, epopt, espalier, etui
• fabiform, fissilingual, Föhnkrankheit, folderol, froward
• gallinipper, grandgore, grue, guilloche, gyaru
• hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, hogo, honorificabilitudinitatibus
• ignivomous, isabelline, itaiitai
• jabroni, jamais vu, jehu, jumentous
• kaffir, kakopygian, knipperdollin
• leman, lemniscate, limnovore, linsey-woolsey, longicorn
• malacia, malison, milt, mongo, morepork
• narrenfreiheit, nef, nihilartikel, nobiliary particle, nosism
• ogonek, ombré, ooglification, orchidectomy, ordured, orf
• pace, pareidolia, pavonated, petrichor, pismire, pong, pruniferous, puggle, pulveratricious, purse
• quacksalver, quagga, qualtagh, quidnunc
• ronion, roynish, rubirosa
• salmagundi, scrutator, seneschal, shebang, sinople, stevedore, suovetaurilia
• teratogenesis, tergiversate, thagomizer, thon, tiffin, tittery-whoppet, tmesis, toby, tyro
• ucalegon, ultramontane
• veneficial, verdigris, vespertilionine, vinegeroon
• weeaboo, williwaw, witzelsucht, wooper looper
• xenodocheionology, xyster
• yazoo, ypsiliform, yoink
• zanjero, zenzizenzizenzic, zinnober, zugzwang

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Where Do the Blue Raspberries Grow, Anyway?

Post-Coachella, Sarah put up an article up at Independent.com telling about her experiences as a first-timer. In it, she recalled that I ordered — and consumed — two snowcones, back-to-back. It's true. I did. And I did it with a big, stained grin on my face. (What the article didn't mention is that I asked for extra syrup on the second one, sugar-addled fifth grader-style.) The second of these two frosty treats — which in 100-degree Indio heat seriously rocked my world — was flavored with the delicious but mysterious flavor of blue raspberry.


I've often wondered exactly why this flavor exists, much less in the abundance it does today. Raspberries, after all, aren't blue. Yet virtually any candy offering a rainbow of flavor sensations picks blue to be raspberry. The rest (in order) generally go as follows: cherry or strawberry, orange, lemon (though banana flavor for sadistic candy companies), lime or green apple, and finally grape (blackcurrant in the U.K). On a good day, pink might be watermelon, which makes about as much sense as blue raspberry but that's a different blog post. And then, almost always, blue raspberry is stuck there, between lime and grape. Odd, no? I mean, we have tasty blue berries already. They're called "blueberries." Yet the flavor is generally what I imagine is a flavor that doesn't exist in nature matched with a color that doesn't generally appear on non-poisonous things.

Sadly, Google is not particularly helpful in solving this mystery, so I have to take what I can get. And that's Wikipedia. Take it with a grain of salt, but the Wikipedia entry for "blue raspberry" states that the flavor does not come from a real blue fruit, but was derived in the late '50s from the juice of whitebark raspberry fruit juice. Its pairing with electric blue food dye, Wikipedia explains, helps differentiate the flavor from strawberry. (And here I thought the color was just for the added benefit of turning one's mouth all Smurfy.) The entry concludes with a short list of various brands that have incorporated the flavor, including (in order) Go-Gurt, ICEE, Dum Dum Pops, Jolly Ranchers, Skittlers, and Hubba Bubba. (Read that list out loud as see if in doesn't put a smile on your face. Works best if screamed. At work.) In short, the concept of blue raspberry is a total fabrication that now sours in my stomach.

A small debate on the entry's talk page questions, however, if the flavor might have a real-life basis after all. Some allege that the fruit species Rubus leucodermis — which literally translates to "white-skinned bramble berry" but is more popularly called as the "whitebark raspberry" or, oddly, the "black raspberry" — is known to some Native Americans as the "blue raspberry," though often as the frambuesa azul. Could be, but one should note that a Google search for that turns up mostly Spanish-language sites hawking the same list of candy brands to Spanish-speakers.

And if we trust what Google tells us — and who doesn't? — then I think we have our answer.