The Cabaret of Plants by Richard Mabey

Author:Richard Mabey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books

In December 1990 Daniel L. McKinley, an emeritus professor of biology from New York, wrote to Charles Nelson about some tipitiwitchet evidence he’d unearthed while working on a biography of William Bartram. He’d been puzzled, as have many naturalists, over this supposedly vernacular tag, and the vague suggestions by Ellis that John Bartram had reported it as an ‘Indian name, either Cherokee or Catabaw [sic] but I cannot now recollect’. What alerted McKinley’s suspicions was a throwaway remark in a letter from Collinson in June 1784: ‘I hear my Friend Dobbs at 73 has gott a Colts Tooth in his head & married a young lady of 22. It is now in vain to write to him for seeds or plants of Tipitiwitchet now He has got one of his Own to play with.’ McKinley was told by authorities from the Department of Anthropology at the US National Museum of Natural History that no such word existed in any native American language. (Since then I’ve located, via an internet search, a very similar term for the flytrap – ‘titipiwitshik’ – in a dictionary of the Lenape language of East Coast Indians. This is certainly close enough to be a prompt for the snappier and more memorable term the North Atlantic botanists’ club began to use, but it doesn’t invalidate McKinley’s intriguing theory about why they may have tweaked it.)

McKinley then tried another tack, and looked for what the word might mean in English. In Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1970), ‘tippett’ is a fur collar. This is one of the standard meanings given in the Oxford English Dictionary, too, which also gives as meaning (2), ‘a jocular term for a hangman’s noose’, and (3), ‘an organ or feature in an animal resembling or suggesting a tippet’. In other dialect dictionaries McKinley found ‘twitch’ as a noose for frisky horses, or a tight boot. ‘Twitchety’ is fidgety or jerky. Ozark mountain folk tales used the term ‘twitchet’ for the female genitalia. It begins to look as if flytrap leaves – a pair of moist, red, semicircles fringed by hairs, which remorselessly gripped their hapless prey – were being likened to the vagina dentata. Whichever member of the group originally coined the name, it looks as if he was deliberately intending it to be a piece of covert ribaldry.

McKinley also suggests that the ‘Venus’ in Venus flytrap was a respectably disguised riff on the same idea. In Botticelli’s painting The Birth of Venus, the Goddess of Love emerges – naked but demure – from a scallop, a rather flat and unsuggestive mollusc (the painting is often jokingly referred to as ‘Venus on the half-shell’). But Venus as a scientific name was proposed by Linnaeus in 1758 for a group of bivalves, including the Quahog shore clams of North America (now generically known as Mercenaria) and the Royal Comb Venus shell (Venus dione now Pitar dione), which when opened have an uncanny resemblance to the splayed leaves of a tipitiwitchet. They’re moist, semicircular, full of soft, palpable flesh, and with a powerful grip when closing.

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