According to some people, if you travel to the midwestern US, point to a bell pepper, and ask a local resident what it is, they’re likely to tell you that it’s a “mango.” Then if you point to a mango, the same resident will call it… a “mango.” This odd situation, which is evidently true, at least based on the article Mango: The Pepper Puzzlement published in the journal American Speech in 1996.
Here is how this strange linguistic situation arose. The tropical fruit called a mango is native to India and surrounding reasons. The word “mango” entered English in the 1500s, just about the time that English explorers would have started encountering mangoes. “Mango” is borrowed from Tamil, and is probably based on the English visitors mishearing the Tamil word “mankay.”
When the European explorers reached Southeast Asia, they discovered that mangoes are delicious and wanted to bring some home with them. It probably took no more than a quick back-of-the-parchment calculation to realize that in the months it was going to take them to get back home, the fresh mangoes were either going to go bad or, more likely, they’d all be eaten long before they arrived. So they did what people in those days did when they wanted to preserve food: they pickled the mangoes.
Halfway around the world, of course, other Europeans were busy settling North America. It was a hard life, trying to survive in what was still largely wilderness, and they were happy to get their hands on any treats and delicacies they could. Among the delicacies imported to North America were pickled mangoes.
Virtually nobody in North America at the time had ever seen a mango in any form other than pickled. That might be why, as early as 1699, the word “mango” in North America came to mean “something pickled.” There’s a 1699 cookbook that refers to “mango of cucumbers” and “mango of walnuts” (the process of pickling walnuts may have been lost since then; I didn’t even know it was possible). But it became common usage to call any sort of pickled food “mango” — and in those days before refrigeration, they did a lot of pickling. By the 1700s “mango” was being used as a verb, meaning “to pickle”. So if they had ever seen a fresh mango, which they didn’t, they would have been able to say “mango that mango” or “mangoed mango.” Another opportunity lost.
So that explains, in general, an unexpected usage of the word “mango.” But we started out talking about bell peppers, not pickles, didn’t we? Well, it turns out that one of the most popular mangoes (the pickle kind) in North America during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries was made by stuffing a bell pepper with spiced cabbage and mangoing — that is, pickling — the combination. The popularity of that combination led to the green pepper being called a “mango” even before it was pickled. The term stayed in use in the midwestern US long after events intervened. Events such as local cultivation, refrigeration, and air cargo, all of which have been involved in a decades-long conspiracy to eliminate mangoed mangoes from North American pantries.
