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Word of the day Vanilla
Did You Know?
How did vanilla get such a bad rap? The flavor with that name certainly has enough fans, with the bean of the Vanilla genus of orchids finding its way into products ranging from ice cream to coffee to perfumes to air fresheners. Vanilla's unfortunate reputation arose due to its being regarded as the "basic" flavor among ice-cream selections, particularly as more complex flavors emerged on the market. (Its somewhat beigey color probably didn't help.) From there, people began using the adjective to describe anything plain, ordinary, or conventional.
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Examples
"Training for sales, marketing and installation staff takes place in a series of small conference rooms on one side of the floor.… They're rather vanilla, but the company plans to enliven them by hiring graffiti artists to paint colorful murals on the parapet wall outside the windows." — Sandy Smith, Philadelphia Magazine, 14 Feb. 2019
"Joanna is frustrated that she's forbidden from sending more personal replies and breaks the rules at a certain point, with unexpected consequences. But apart from this tiny transgression, she's too vanilla to be a very compelling character." — Peter DeBruge, Variety, 20 Feb. 2020
Vanilla is a flavoring derived from orchids of the genus Vanilla, primarily obtained from pods of the Mexican species, flat-leaved vanilla (V. planifolia). The word vanilla, derived from vainilla, the diminutive of the Spanish word vaina (vaina itself meaning a sheath or a pod), is translated simply as "little pod". Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican people cultivated the vine of the vanilla orchid, called tlīlxochitl by the Aztecs.
Pollination is required to make the plants produce the fruit from which the vanilla flavoring is obtained. In 1837, Belgian botanist Charles François Antoine Morren discovered this fact and pioneered a method of artificially pollinating the plant. The method proved financially unworkable and was not deployed commercially.
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