Whether we realize it or not, we live in an era of pedantic vegetable names. A mere hundred years ago, H.G. Wells could write this: “…Mr. Moses Gluckstein, a city gent and very pleasant and fond of sparrowgrass and chokes.” But nowadays, you’d just have to go with the more formal “asparagus and artichokes.” Wells got away with it, but he was at the tail end of an historical period of Greater Vegetable Permissiveness. It was just in 1885 that the New English Dictionary explained that “sparrowgrass” was “dialect or vulgar,” and one really ought to use only “asparagus” — and also, by the way, avoid “sparagus,” “sperach,” and “sperage,” all of which had been used for the vegetable.
Dropping the leading “a” used to be acceptable, too. In 1653, Nicholas Culpeper wrote a reference book about herbs and used all three interchangeably; his entry read “Asparagus, Sparagus, or Sperage.”
“Asparagus” has been part of English since at least the year 1000, even though the actual vegetable has probably been around somewhat longer. It probably came from Latin (the word, not the vegetable). It’s not clear what it was called before that, because while “sparrowgrass” was more common for a long time, it’s pretty obviously an adaptation of “asparagus” instead of representing a common older term.
The conflict between “asparagus” and “sparrowgrass” began to come to light in the late 1700s. The Pronunciation Dictionary of 1791 explained that “Sparrow-grass is so general that asparagus has an air of stiffness and pedantry.” For the next few decades, botanists seem to have used “asparagus”, while cookbooks used “sparrowgrass.” And grocers, who otherwise haven’t usually been seen as a bunch of radicals, often simply said “grass.”
The battle was at its peak in the last decades of the 1800s. “I have heard the word sparrowgrass from the lips of a real Lady—but then she was in her seventies,” is recorded in The Rook’s Garden, published in 1865. It was clearly such a dangerous and controversial subject that the writer, Edward Bradley, had to shroud his real identity in the dubious alias “Cuthbert Bede.”
By the early 20th century, “asparagus” had not only won out, but “sparrowgrass” had virtually disappeared, driven into linguistic hiding by Latin-spouting vegetable pedants and scolds. And that’s where the situation still stands today. As for “choke” in place of “artichoke”? The story is pretty much the same; in the late 1800s, Objections Were Raised, and by the early 1900s it was “artichoke” or nothing. So how do you like them apples?
