About Those Tabebuia Trees…

A few days ago I posted some comments about this sentence from a gardening column my husband was writing:

Such plants include azalea, cape honeysuckle, camellia, tea olive, Carolina jessamine, and tabebuia trees.

I pointed out that our brains would automatically turn every plant listed into a tree. And I wondered whether a list in Latin would work the same way.

My friend Jenna passed that question on to a professor of Latin and Greek. The professor said she would have rearranged the items in the list, just as my husband and I did. And she pointed out that “tabebuia” in the original sentence is an adjective, while all the other items are nouns.

If you remove “trees,” tabebuia turns back into a noun:

Such plants include azalea, cape honeysuckle, camellia, tea olive, Carolina jessamine, and tabebuia.

This language of ours never ceases to amaze me.

(Thanks, Jenna!)

Tabebuia

Tabebuia

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