I: Periwinkle
How one word covered a plant and a snail.
Good morning. Today is primidi, the 11th of Germinal, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate la pervenche, a flower that's not just a crayon color.
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Periwinkle flowers bloom for nearly half the year, and they do so from a crawling shrubby vine – the shy kind that refuses to go up in the air – making them a popular form of ground cover. There are two main periwinkle species cultivated called ... the big ones and the small ones. Vinca major is the more showy species, but also considered invasive in many areas. Vinca minor is more well-behaved and has some medicinal qualities that are still being investigated, even if it does have smaller and fewer flowers.
The word itself is the thing. Thanks to Crayola, most North American kids grew up thinking of periwinkle as mainly a color – a sort of useless super-pale purple that was best suited to princess dresses on the coloring book page. Crayola had a knack for giving its colors memorable names, but periwinkle stands out because it just sounds funny.
It's simply fun to say. And I can prove it, because it's one of the very few multisyllabic words to evolve twice for two completely different nouns from two completely distinct origins.
