Complex Numbers

Chartreuse

Chartreuse
an entry for "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+]

Chartreuse is called chartreuse not because it's named after Chartreuse, but because it's named after Chartreuse.

I'll take it chronologically.

It starts with a mountain village now called Saint-Pierre-de-Chartreuse. I'm sure you know who Saint-Pierre was, though an alternate translation is something like Holy Rock, which makes a lot more sense, considering. "De" of course just means "of" As for Chartreuse itself, well, those origins are far more speculative; we know it was older than the Roman occupation of Gaul, and it may be named after a local pre-Roman tribe who, I'd venture to speculate, had no idea of the size of the world or that a variant of their name would one day be uttered all over it.

If I were writing fiction, I'd posit that the Gauls living around there had a particularly precious monolith that they'd make offerings near, hence "holy rock." But I'm not writing fiction at the moment; I'm doing a blog entry.

Anyway, at some point the village ended up giving the name to the entire mountain range, now known as the Chartreuse Mountains (massif de la Chartreuse).

Then, in the late 11th Century C.E., some monks took over a château somewhere in those mountains; as monasteries sometimes are, it was fairly remote. The mountains named the monastery and the order of monks, which Latinized the name: Carthusian.

The Carthusian order did whatever it was monks did for a few centuries, and then, a miracle: somehow they obtained a recipe for a particular medicinal spiced liqueur. While I'd be tempted to say it came from On High, as it were, the story goes that some guy gave it to them, and they supposedly spent the next hundred years making it better.

What they finally released to the world is, of course, today known as Chartreuse, a liqueur with a distinctive green color somewhat different from that of the related liqueur, absinthe. There are variants with different colors now, and that leads to some confusion: chartreuse can refer to a greenish-yellow, like the original Chartreuse, or a yellow, like one of its variants. Though apparently the latter is normally called "chartreuse yellow," so maybe it's not all confusing.

So, to reiterate: chartreuse (the color) is named after Chartreuse (the liquor), which is named after Chartreuse (the monastery), which is named after Chartreuse (the mountains), which were named after the (I'm guessing) holy rock of Chartreuse.

And with that, I could use a drink.