“That’s Not a Mango, It’s a…,” My Friend Blurted Out
I bounded up the stairs with enthusiasm. Running into the bustling kitchen, I proudly held out the fruit. “Here’s the mango.” I had just dashed to the corner market at the last-minute to secure the missing ingredient needed by my French roommate who was manning the stove. He wanted the mango for a salsa to complete the abalone dish we had spent an hour or so preparing for the dinner guests at our small wind-grizzled beach house in El Granada.
My friend looked at my open hand displaying the fruit. It took a split second, and then he burst out laughing loudly, hilariously, uproariously, Next thing, he doubled over laughing, out of breath, couldn’t talk any more.
Finally, he garbled out and then screamed, “What do you think that is?” I replied incredulously, “It’s a mango.”
My friend laughed more, louder again, fiendishly. Suddenly, he realized I was serious: I clearly thought that fruit I held was a mango.
Still laughing, he calmed down a bit, and took a slightly serious tone. “That’s not a mango, it’s green pepper!” he cried out.
“I know that,” I replied, “But it’s also a mango.” “No, it’s not.” “Yes, it is.”
Soon everyone else in the room was chiming in, ridiculing me. I was more than embarrassed. I was personally shattered. Here I was 21 years old, freshly graduated from college, and something I had believed my whole life was more than undermined in public in front of friends, my belief was destroyed. Shown to be a complete delusion, a false belief, a canard. And yet I had believed it without question for over 21 years. It was an internalized core belief, as true to me as the sun setting in the West.
My French friend finally felt some empathy and asked me gently why did I think this fruit was a mango. I told him that it was what I was told when young, what I had grown up believing. I told him how my mother’s brothers Andy and Russel, serious amateur farmers who grew up on a family farm, would come over to our house in the late summer, bringing excess vegetables and fruit from their backyard bounty to share with our family. Tomatoes, corn, squash, watermelon, and of course those beautiful “mangoes” that were held out with pride. “Look at this mango!” We kids didn’t think twice about it, especially since our gardens and groceries did not contain real mangoes (a tropical fruit that presumably would be difficult to grow in the Midwest).
I was part of a long-standing but somewhat Midwestern verbal tradition. According the Indy Star newspaper in 1903:
“At the market, an order for mangoes will be filled with green peppers, which are commonly called mango peppers, in Indiana at least.
“What is a mango?” was asked of Mr. Faulkner, of the Faulkner-Webb Company, which makes a specialty of pickling mangoes. His statement was that a mango is a green pepper stuffed with cabbage and mixed, minced picket, highly spiced and whole pickled together.”
The New York Times reported similar word usage in the Midwest and South in 1984. The Star updated its mango story in 1991, showing continued usage but also probing the origins of this label for a green bell pepper. The story quotes a British food historian who regarded the bell pepper as a British substitute for rare mangos used in Indian-style pickles. By this version, the recipe got transferred to America in 17th Century cookbooks and was allegedly popularized by the Amish, who settled in the Midwest. By some accounts, mango as a word became a verb meaning “to pickle.” We are not told how or when the British grew wise about mangoes. But American Midwesterners apparently used the label for green bell peppers for over 300 years.
Of course, language is full of colloquialisms or regional word usages that vary from place to place. To cite a familiar case, a heated submarine-style sandwich with multiple meats and cheeses might be called a a grinder (New England), a spukie (Boston), a hero (New York), a hoagie (Mid Atlantic), po’ boy (New Orleans) or an Italian (Maine), they are not all the same but usually close in kind.
Colloquial expressions and words become established with repeated usage within a somewhat isolated community. Colloquialisms may cause confusion because someone from outside the region many not understand them, may be baffled by what they mean. This is, of course, a barrier to communication but at least it is typically recognized when it occurs — -the parties involved usually know they are not communicating and can seek clarification on the spot.
What linguists call a mondegreen is a different matter. Mondegreens are misheard or misinterpreted words or phrases. The speaker says one thing, the listener hears something else. The term originates with writer Sylvia Wright in 1954 after mishearing words in a ballad as “Lady Mondegreen” rather than the correct phrase “layd him on the green.”
Mondegreens are common with songs and poems. Some well-known collectively held mondegreens include Roberta Flack’s famous line “strumming my fate with his fingers,” being heard and known as “stuffing my face with his fingers.” Elton John’s lament, “Rocket man, burning out his fuse up here alone,” apparently sounds to many as “Rocket man, burning all the trees off every lawn.” I am sure you have your favorites. For the most part, mondegreens seem pretty harmless, in part because people often do not really know or understand many song lyrics or poetic phrases anyway.
Midwestern mangoes might be classified by linguists as homonyms. A homonym is a group of two or more words which share the same spelling or pronunciation but have different meanings. Homographs and homophones are different kinds homonyms. Homographs share the same spelling but differ in meaning, like row and row (or for that matter mango and mango. Homophones sounds the same but spell differently and mean different things, like see and sea.
Homographs can create a lot of trouble in communication. Two parties may be using some word or concept and think they are referring to the same thing, invoking the same meaning, but they are not. Like a mango. Since the mango has a physical manifestation, its homographic nature may be more likely to be found out. Concepts differ, parties may labor on for long periods without ever learning they are talking about different ideas, subtle nuances or even stronger distinctions.
Such misunderstandings may be more the norm rather the exception. Research by Celeste Kidd of Berkeley and colleagues examined the cognitive diversity of known concepts in the American population.[1] They studied same-word concepts in two domains: common animals (finch, robin, chicken, eagle, ostrich, penguin, salmon, seal, dolphin, whale) and politicians (Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Elizabeth Warren, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan).
They find in their study that, “Our results show at least ten to thirty quantifiably different variants of word meanings exist for even common nouns. Further, people are unaware of this variation, and exhibit a strong bias to erroneously believe that other people share their semantics.” To conclude, they note: “Our results document substantial disagreement between people for word meanings, even for common concepts.”
That’s right, we don’t always agree on what a chicken is, yet we use that word commonly and think that all our fellow speakers agree when often then do not.
Is it at any wonder that effective communication is hard, takes great effort, and may still be rare? That’s especially likely if you speak in colorful colloquialisms, if you catch my drift.
But let me end on a more optimistic note. Colleagues Douglas Guilbeault, Austin van Loon, Katharina Lix, Amir Goldberg and Sameer Srivastava studied how people influence others who hold opposing views.[2] They distinguished between observable or known differences in views versus those that are obscured or not obvious. The surprising finding of their study is that influence of one person on another is more likely to occur when the latent concepts underlying the beliefs are unobserved or unknown. Apparently, knowing the differences upfront tends to put people on alert and makes them defensive while not knowing makes them open and influenceable.
I guess that’s why I immediately stopped calling green bell peppers mangos after my encounter in that kitchen many years ago.
Glenn R. Carroll
August 21, 2023
[1] See: Louis Marti, Shengyi Wu, Steven T. Piantadosi, Celeste Kidd. Latent Diversity in Human Concepts. Open Mind 2023; 7 79–92. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/opmi_a_00072
[2] Guilbeault, Douglas, Austin van Loon, Katharina Lix, Amir Goldberg, and Sameer Srivastava. Exposure to the Views of Opposing Others with Latent Cognitive Differences Results in Social Influence — But Only When Those Differences Remain Obscured. Management Science. 2023. Forthcoming.