Alaskan Range: Appleknockers
"Browsing the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) can be fun, as I rediscovered while researching one of my dad’s old euphemisms, “appleknocker.” He often called my brother and me “little appleknockers,” which I always took as an endearment,'' writes columnist and librarian Greg Hill.
DARE describes how English is used differently around the country. For example, “appleknocker” means “fruit picker” in most parts of the country, but it means “a rustic” in the North, and among Northwestern loggers it “refers to a man who has not worked in the woods and is attempting to convince people that he is an old-timer in logging work.”
The word “apple” is interesting in its own right. Its origins extend to Proto-Indo-European root words like “ap,” “ab,” “af,” and “av.” According to the “Etymologically Speaking” website, all European words for “apple” start with one of these, except in Romance languages.
French apples are called “pommes,” stemming from the Latin word “pomum,” meaning “all fruit.” The Latin word specifically for apple is “malam,” derived from the Greek word for “melon.” Spanish for “apple” is “manzana,” a Gallo-Roman translation of “matianum,” which was the name of a scented golden apple first bred by Ceasar’s friend Matius.
Matius’ best apples couldn’t knock Kazakhstan’s mighty aport apples. Christopher Robbins’ extremely readable “Apples Are from Kazakhstan” says the aport grows “as big as a baby’s head” and is wonderfully fragrant. They were enormously popular in Soviet Russia, and no Kremlin office or reception was complete without a basket of aports.
Robbins describes how an amazing Russian scientist named Nikolai Vavilov believed that apples’ origins could be genetically traced to the Kazakhstan’s Tien Shan mountains, whose valleys teem with wild apple orchards. The most esteemed Russian scientist of the early 1900s, Vavilov explored more than 50 countries identifying the birthplaces of more plants than anyone else.
Vavilov “believed that farming had arisen not in fertile valleys,” Robbins writes, “but in mountain areas where water was plentiful and man could easily defend himself. And so it was mostly mountain ranges — the Andes, Rockies, Caucasus, and the Tien Shan — where he chose to seek out the original forms of modern plants.”
Robbins described Vavilov as a scientific “all-rounder: botanist, geneticist, agronomist, and geographer. Something of a genius,” yet “modest, with a open, boyish face … the archetypal absent-minded professor.” He always avoided politics assiduously and expected everyone he encountered to be as open and principled as himself.
Not so his assistant, Trofim Lysenko, an underhanded sort who made up for his lack of training and scientific insight by “launching political attacks on those who opposed him.” Lysenko had his own, bizarre ideas about science, and he “attracted the interest of Stalin, who was in the process of formulating a five-year plan to enforce the collectivization of all farms” that led to an estimated 12 million deaths from the resulting famine.
As politically ambitious and adept as he was underhanded, Lysenko quickly became the head of Soviet agriculture and soon orchestrated a series of political attacks on Vavilov, twisting and distorting his mentor’s activities at every turn. This led to Vavilov’s imprisonment, torture and eventual confession to crimes like seeding the Leningrad airport with weeds, and his condemnation to the Gulag.
Fittingly, Lysenko is remembered for his vile, self-serving acts, and “Lysenkoism” is defined in my favorite Alaska blog, Wickersham’s Conscience, as “the manipulation or distortion of the scientific process as a way to reach a predetermined conclusion as dictated by an ideological bias.”
Vavilov loved Kazakstan and hoped to be exiled to an infamous farming camp there, but was assigned elsewhere and met with continuous torture and solitary imprisonment in horrible circumstances until his death in 1943. Too bad he didn’t live in present day Fairbanks, where he could botanize and lecture in peace, admire Clair Lammers’ apples, and perhaps enjoy a slice of the apple-bourbon pie I recently crafted.
He certainly could rely on the public library to be a perfect antidote to crypto-Lysenkoism. Who knows how many present-day Vavilovs are studying here right now?
As Robert Schuller said, “Anyone can count the seeds in an apple, but only God can count the number of apples in a seed.”
