>>965
Check this out:
>How an airplane got to be a vegetable
>The Aboriginal languages of Australia are well known, in linguistic circles at least, for having four classes: men and animate things; women, fire, and dangerous things; edible fruits and vegetables; and miscellaneous things. Political guru George Lakoff, who focuses on how people's political thinking grows out of the metaphors they embrace, picked up on this second gender and wrote a book about it called "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things."
>This gets us to how "airplane" became a vegetable. In the Aboriginal language of Gurr-goni, spoken in northern Australia, there is a special gender for "edible vegetables," according to linguist Guy Deutscher in his book "The Unfolding of Language." Other plants were eventually included in this "edible" gender, he speculates, as were wooden objects, such as canoes, the Aboriginals' main means of transport. When Gurr-goni borrowed the English word "airplane" into their language, as "erriplen," they conceived of it as a sort of flying canoe, and assigned it to the vegetable gender. And that is how an airplane became a vegetable.