11.23.08
Chile is not chilly, chili is not chilly, and never the twain shall meet
It’s a food day today, what with me cooking my entry in the finals of a local Cook Like a Wokstar contest (I admit that my interest in entering may have been influenced by the pun). So the theme today is food; and because this immediately follows yesterday’s debunking of a false etymology of a place name, we’ll throw more place-name chat in, as well, in this excerpt from Everything You Know About English Is Wrong
Chili peppers hot,
Chile peppers cold,
Chilly peppers in the pot, nine centuries old.
This, of course, is a recast of the old “pease porridge” nursery rhyme, infused with a different set of concepts to make a point about the verbal porridge representing the relationship between chili peppers, the country of Chile, and the chilly reception you’ll get from etymologists if you suggest that any of these words are connected.
Chili peppers hot: Chili (the pepper and ultimately the stew made with the pepper) traces back through Spanish to the native South American Nahuatl word for the pepper plant. It is not, as Dutch physician and botanist Jacobus Bontius wrote in 1631, a “quasi dicas Piper e Chile” (“named as if a pepper from Chile,” if my Latin translation is anywhere in the same hemisphere as the actual meaning, but then again, remember that I tried to translate “E Pluribus Unum” by myself as a kid, and could only come up with “made of lead”).
Chile peppers cold: One might say that the etymological trail to Chile has grown cold. Though we’re not sure how the country name originated, no possibilities connect it with the hot pepper plant, and one possibility even suggests that it comes from native tchili, meaning “snow,” from the native South American language Aymara, or a word from the native South American language Quecha: chili meaning “cold” or “snow” or, yes, “chilly.” But even so:
Chilly peppers in the pot, nine centuries old: Our adjective chilly and its source noun chill, meaning “cold,” traces all the way back to Old English. And just to confuse matters, one early spelling of chill was chile.
Why do I spend so much time disassociating chili and Chile and chilly? Well, I hail from the Cincinnati area, where a favorite local dish is a bed of spaghetti, topped with a spiced meat sauce (cinnamon and chocolate or cocoa among the spices), chopped onions, beans and grated cheese [recipe from Cincinnati chef Paul Sturkey here]. This dish is “Cincinnati chili,” and it, too, has nothing to do with any of the aforementioned chilis.
Yes, you Texans and Mexicans and Chileans, we know this concoction is not “real” chili, and, by gosh, we don’t care.
and 
. Feel free to 
Springer Kneeblood said,
November 23, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Chili and chile and chilli and chilly and god knows what else are used interchangeably and incorrectly all around me and very possibly BY me. I used to care; now I don’t. I just like to sear my tongue with fabulously hot and tasy food and try to determine whether my sweaty neck and brow are cooling to me or to the chili.
Curtis said,
November 25, 2008 at 6:20 pm
As you probably actually know, Nahuatl is spoken in Mexico, which happens to be in North America (really!), not South.
Bill Brohaugh said,
November 25, 2008 at 7:36 pm
Curtis, I thank you for the “as you probably know” courtesy, but the gaffe you politely alerted us to was indeed my mistake. Edit made. North America! North America! (I’ve beaten it into my little noggin.)
Luckily, this mistake does not preclude me from running for vice president, as I know that North America is a country, nor does it preclude me from my cartography career as an editor with The Atlas of True Names Give or Take a Continent (see my previous post about that topic).