With six degrees celsius, a blue sky and a fierce winter sun it was a very nice day today up here. I went down to Battery Park to read, and to look at tourists taking pictures of the Statue of Liberty, skateboarders almost breaking their necks, and yuppie Manhattanites showing off their heavy and expensive Amsterdam-style city bikes.
I took a picture of the cotton candy vendors because it was a pretty sight, but also because I like the word: the sweet, sticky stuff is not named after your cotton t-shirt, obviously, but after the real thing, the woolly cotton-balls that grow on the cotton-plant. These plants don't grow in Europe (they do in the US), and I have never seen or touched raw cotton myself. I think though, that the average American (sub)urban child is also more familiar with the candy than with the real thing.
In Dutch cotton candy is called 'sugar spider', which I always thought was because the candy looks and feels like a spider web, and is just as sticky. Luckily I checked wikipedia before writing this piece, and I was proved wrong. Apparently, and since it is on wikipedia it must be true, the candy was not named after the spider web, but after the process by which it is made. A bowl with sugar is spun at high speed, and because of the centrifugal force the sugar is pressed through small holes, 'spun' (as in spinning wool) into sticky strands, and then put on a stick or into a bag. The verb 'to spin', in its latter meaning, is the same in Dutch as in English, but also the same as the Dutch word for spider, 'spin', hence the confusion (now I wonder whether the activity of spinning was named after the insect or the other way around, what a conundrum!). I like the spider web-etymology a lot better though, it always gave the already strange texture of the candy an added allure of scariness.
I also include my own Statue of Liberty picture, and a picture of a loud sea-gull that looks deceivingly much like a quiet dove.
1 comment:
It's funny that you mention the cotton plant. I just finished watching a Swedish movie (I am Curious: Yellow/Blue), and in a scene in Blue there is a cotton field with ripe cotton buds or whatever they're called. The scene brought vivid memories of how much i liked being in a cotton field at harvest time in Albania. That's my roundabout way of telling you that cotton does indeed grow in Europe, even in Sweden, though like many other things, it probably came from somewhere else, very likely the East rather than today's US territories, if that's what you meant by "America."
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