‘Fuchsia’ is one of those words you hope never to encounter in a spelling bee contest. It has the potential to trip one up. It is a word you probably don’t want to encounter in speech as well, unless you’re confident pronouncing it.
English is littered with words spelled one way and pronounced entirely differently. ‘Ch’ words fall under that category. ‘Choir’, for instance. Or, ‘church’. In the first, the ‘ch’ takes a hard ‘k’ sound; in ‘church’ the ‘ch’ is softened. One may well enquire exasperatedly, “Pray, what’s going on here?” but English seemingly stops to give no explanations sometimes. It leaves us to acquire certain pronunciations through experience, in the course of which, some of us end up looking asinine.
Former Australian cricketer Adam Gilchrist was sometimes greeted by fans in the subcontinent as Mr Gil-church or something approximating that.
With ‘fuchsia’, English is enjoying a teasing moment of double or triple bluff because not only is the ‘ch’ soft, it is extra-soft giving it an ‘sh’ sound rather than a ‘ch’; also, its first syllable ‘fu’ is pronounced ‘few’, not ‘foo’ or, as is more common, ‘f’ as in ‘fun’ or ‘fund’.
‘Fu’ and ‘ch’ in collaboration have unfortunately been known to stroll down a path that’s brought a fair deal of pronunciation mayhem, accompanied by red-faced squirming and a good deal of laughter from the unwitting user and his fortunately-informed companion, respectively.
Luckily the number of times these two get together is limited and we can only be thankful to English for small mercies. Fuchsia, therefore, is pronounced ‘few-sheer’.
A fuchsia, as most of us know, is a flowering plant that puts out pretty flowers whose colour is a mixture of pink and purple. In doing some background reading, I learned that the plant itself was discovered in the late 17th century on a Caribbean island by a monk Charles Plumier who promptly named it after the German botanist — yes, hold your breath — Leonhart Fuchs.
The surname is pronounced ‘fooks’, and those of us slightly less-informed will be grateful for getting that right. Why didn’t Plumier name it after himself, I wonder? Wouldn’t that have been easier? Or, not really? Plum-eer? Ploo-meer? Ploo-me-yay? Whatever the case, the poor gorgeously flowering bush appears to have been affected by it all, for its flowers – as all of us who have seen a fuchsia bush in bloom will attest to — are somewhat bell-like and winged, and rather than face upward in a proud, stunning display of colour, tend to appear slightly overwhelmed by their own beauty for they hang their heads in humility. It is what has drawn me to the fuchsia for a long time, its quiet unassuming, unflaunted beauty.
I happen to have a young fuchsia bush in my garden, not planted in the ground but growing out of a pot. It is that time of the year when the garden is a riot of colour and my fuchsias are more than matching the others for resplendent hue.
The other day, when my prankster friend Barney visited, I pointed out this strange characteristic of humility and beauty that I’d noticed in the fuchsia. Barney looked doubtful, which may be attributed to the fact that he is a lover of roses. His garden has a sunlit strip of golden yellow that comes exclusively from a lovingly-cultivated row of rose bushes.
“Oh, I don’t know about humility and all that, Kev,” he said, picking up the plant in its pot.
“What are you doing?” I enquired, mildly alarmed.
“Nothing much, watch,” he said, placing the pot on top of a shelf in the corner.
“Still humble?” he asked. “What do you mean?”
“Well,” he pointed out, “look at your fuchsias now. High above all the others and what are they doing? That’s right, looking down on all the rest. That’s not very humble, Kev? Everything, as they say, is a matter of perspective.”
I guess for once Barney has a valid point.
Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.
