ANAND / VAMOSI WEDDING

Congratulations to Pranav Anand and Nikki Vamosi, who were married on September 15! Here is Pranav’s report:

The civil ceremony took place in the Cowell Redwoods on the afternoon of the 15th, and was attended by immediate family. In the spirit of things linguistically related, I discovered after making the cake that marzipan (the base for the little fruit) is a word with mysterious etymological origins. The OED traces it to Italian marzapane, but here the record becomes blurry. One theory breaks this up into Martius panis (`bread of Mars’), an homage to the castles on medieval cakes. Another traces it to the matapanus, or mataban, a coin stamped with the image of an enthroned Christ. A third source suggests that this word gained a sense referring to the volume contained in a small box (reflected in the fact that several regional Romance languages still use a variant to denote a small box, and thereafter the prototypical contents of such boxes — candy. It was further suggested that mataban is a borrowing from the Arabic mawthaban, meaning “the king that sits still.” However, a completely different history has been advanced, connecting the Burmese city of Martaban, famous for its glazed jars. What’s the right story — Martian bread, a coin that becomes a box, or a jar? As one of the sources just cited closes, “nobody has a better idea.” Regardless, these tales serve to remind us how plastic word sense is.