WTN: periwinkle
James Harbeck
periwinkle
Ah, the old curiosity shop on the corner, with its owner, who looks a little like Henry Winkler, and its near-infinite assortment of finds. Look around the store. What shall you pick up today? Perhaps that pretty flower vase with a painting of Persian sprites? Or this weird little winch? Or a set of picks for escargots? No, something less practical… You peer into a corner and spy a pair of tightly laced periwinkle winkle-pickers. You raise an eyebrow; you glance at the shopkeeper and he winks at you. You’re not sure how to take it. He nods to a sign on the wall that says “Sometimes words have two meanings.” Sense spirals in on itself like a snail. Are you convinced?
Let’s unpack these periwinkle winkle-pickers. The trick is that periwinkle isn’t really a word that has two (or more) meanings; it’s two quite different words that just happen to have become identical in form.
The first word – the one that has been in English since Old English times – was at first pervince or pervincle; it came from Late Latin pervinca, from Classical Latin pervica, which is apparently per- ‘thoroughly’ and a form of vincio ‘I bind, I conquer’ (as seen in convince and in “veni vidi vici” too). The Latin form also seems to be shortened from vicapervica, which has an incantatory quality to it, and it is likely also related to pervicus ‘stubborn’. This pervincawas – and in Italian still is – the name for a low-lying flowering plant (a few kinds thereof, of the genus Vinca) with long trailing stems that tend to take root wherever they touch the ground: they are thoroughly bound, and thus stubborn (pervicacious).
Which does not matter when it comes to the usual point of reference for this word. It is the plant’s flowers that are focal: they have five petals and are a light purplish blue with a white centre. This light purplish blue, which in RGB terms is standardized as the very tidy #CCCCFF, is called periwinkle for this reason.
But, because the world is full of complications and wonders, there is also another flowering plant called periwinkle– it was thought to be of the same general kind, but it turns out it is not. It also has five-petalled flowers; they have been cultivated in various colours. The genus is now named Catharanthus. Its most widespread species, Catharanthus roseus, was formerly called Vinca rosea, and it is from this old name that alkaloids produced from it are called vinca alkaloids; two drugs that are used to treat cancer are vinblastine and vincristine, which clung to the vin- though the plant has been uprooted from it. Thus they are related to the colour periwinkle – etymologically but not in any other way.
And then there is the other periwinkle. We’re not completely sure, but it seems that it started with Latin pina, from Greek πίνη (pínē), variant of πίννα (pínna), ‘mussel’, plus Old English wincel ‘corner, bend’ from an Old Germanic root referring to turning or bending. It names a kind of sea snail (‘bendy mussel’, I guess), similar in size to a periwinkle flower but otherwise with nothing in common. Somehow pinewinkel, which could easily have been pennywinkle (as indeed it was, but only in regional variants), became periwinkle. The fact that it evolved to the periwinkle form around the same time as the flower name did, in the early 1500s, suggests some cross-influence or mutual influence. Yes, one is a snail (and not a bluish-purple one either) and the other is a flower, but that doesn’t defeat the mutual lexical attraction – the “sounds familiar” effect. And anyway, periwinkle is a rather winsome word form, if you ask me.
But the little snails turned a corner, so to speak, and left off the peri- in common use: as often as not, now, they’re just called winkles. Which adds a wrinkle, especially if you go shopping for them, because this same root became Dutch winkel, which first meant ‘corner’ but, by metonymy, became a name for a corner store (or a storage corner), and so now Dutch winkel means ‘store, shop’ (and periwinkle seems like it could mean ‘around the store’ – or, if you wish, ‘shop for Persian fairies’). Meanwhile, German Winkel still means ‘angle, corner, nook’. The name Winklercomes from someone who was a shopkeeper, or who lived on a corner. And there are some other words in English that are also related more distantly, from the root meaning ‘bend, turn’: winch, wink, and wince.
Winkles, as you may know, are edible (when cooked), and in Scotland and Ireland you can buy them by the bag; when you get a bag of them, you get a little pin for picking out the winkles from the depths of their shells. The Latin name for them, Littorina littorea, gives a clue that they are found along the seashore – they can be caught in a drag net, but they can also be picked by hand at low tide.
And do you, when picking winkles from the seashore, wear winkle-pickers? Hmm, no, don’t take it so littorally. One ought not to use such fancy shoes for perambulating the damp strand. The point of winkle-pickers is the toe: that is, the toe is long and pointed, and so, wittily, the name suggests you could use it as a winkle-pick, to pick winkles out of their shells. They got this waggish name somewhere around the 1950s, when their popularity peaked with the Teddy Boys.
And so your periwinkle winkle-pickers are a colour named after a flower named for how its stem takes root, and a style of boot named after a device for eating little sea snails. Will you buy them? Where could you wear them? But you are not impervious to their pervicacious charms; you have grown fond of them already, and they sit there saying “pick me!” So, with the slightest rueful wince of convincement, you do.
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