From Ice Cream to the Messiah

The conversation recently turned, as civilized discourses so often do on a sultry afternoon, to the unassuming subject of ice cream. It appears, at first blush, a thoroughly uncomplicated gastronomic diversion; yet, should one care to scratch even a millimetre beneath the surface of the dairy, one unearths an astonishing network of etymological correspondences.

Ice as the Foundation

In a commendable display of linguistic pragmatism, the foundational terminology for iced confections across various languages relies on the most self-evident of phenomena—‘freezing’ or ‘ice’:

• Turkish dondurma (the substantiated causative form of donmak, meaning ‘to cause to freeze’) traces its lineage back to the Proto-Turkic *toŋ-, itself related to Middle Chinese 凍 /tuwng/ (Modern Chinese 冻 /dòng/), denoting frost and ice.
• European tongues exhibit a touching solidarity: German Speiseeis (‘edible ice’), Italian gelato and Spanish helado (‘frozen’), French glace (‘ice’) or crème glacée (‘frozen cream’)—not forgetting, of course, the English ice cream.

A Culinary Encounter: How Foam Became Holy Unction

When one turns to the English word cream (and its continental cousins), the narrative assumes a decidedly more labyrinthine character. The term found its way into European lexicons via Old French creme or cresme—where that elusive middle s quietly abdicated its responsibilities only to find an honourable retirement in the French crème—at which juncture history permitted itself a rather delightful conflation of two entirely distinct notions:

• Celtic crāmum, signifying ‘crust’ or ‘foam’—that rich, opulent stratum rising to the top of undisturbed milk; and
• Greek chrisma, denoting ‘anointing’ or ‘unguent’.

Owing to a happy phonetic and semantic kinship in Old French, the concepts of dairy froth and sacred ointment coalesced into a single linguistic vessel. Thus, a humble kitchen staple quietly annexed the title of a solemn ecclesiastical rite.

Sudden Theology

The Greek χρῖσμα is itself a verbal noun derived from χρίω (‘to anoint’, ‘to rub with oil’). Should one care to fashion an adjective from this verb employing the suffix -τός, which denotes the completed result of an action, one arrives at χριστός—literally ‘anointed’ or ‘smeared with unguent’.

When translators set about rendering the Hebrew מָשִׁיחַ (Mashiach)—originally a participle denoting one consecrated through anointing with oil for kingship or sacred office—they selected precisely this Greek term. Consequently, both Christ and Messiah translate etymologically as ‘the anointed one’.

A Botanical Finale

At this juncture, the circle closes with startling abruptness, and from the theological deeps there bob-ups once more… the matter of the plum. Or, more precisely, the sloe.

It will be recalled that during the Passion, Roman soldiers placed a crown of thorns upon the head of Jesus. The scientific designation for the blackthorn is Prunus spinosa, literally ‘thorny plum’.

Note: Modern English plum descends from the same Latin prūnum as the more straightforward prune. The Romans borrowed the term from the Greeks (προῦμνον), who had in turn acquired it from one of the ancient Anatolian languages.

However, the Germanic languages took a somewhat different path regarding the sloe: English sloe and German Schlehe derive from the Proto-Indo-European root *(s)leh₃y-, signifying ‘bluish’. Yet Germanic tongues also employ names such as blackthorn and Schwarzdorn, where thorn and Dorn signify a prickle. These trace back to Proto-Indo-European *tr̥nós (‘sharp, prickly’).

Admittedly, the prickly sloe itself likely played little direct part in the biblical drama; its natural habitat terminates rather further south, around the basin of the Sea of Marmara. The English descriptor thorny (much like the Greek ἀκάνθινος) derives not strictly from the blackthorn bush, but from thorns and briars in the broader botanical sense.

Such are the unexpected itineraries prompted by a simple portion of ice cream. The next time you partake of the dairy or smooth an unguent upon your hands, pause to reflect on how intimately ice, cream, thorns, and theology are bound together by the slender, invisible threads of human speech—threads which we continue, with no small degree of amusement, to untangle.