Daffodil vs. Jonquil

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, I’m Claudia Harrelson calling from Cheryville, North Carolina.

Hi, Claudia. Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

Well, I have a question. It’s springtime here.

And all of the beautiful yellow flowers that everyone else calls daffodils are blooming.

But when I was growing up, my grandmother, who lived with us, always called those flowers jonquils.

And that’s what everyone in our family called them.

In fact, I never heard the term daffodils for those flowers until I was actually in high school.

And we were reading the poem by Wordsworth called daffodils.

And there was a picture, and I said, those aren’t daffodils.

Those are jonquils.

So I’ve been wondering all these years why it is in my family that we call them jonquils.

Instead of daffodils. Can you spell that for us? I think it would have been spelled J-O-N-Q-U-I-L-S.

It was the word my grandmother used.

Yeah, that sounds right.

Well, yes, I had the same experience, Claudia.

I grew up in Kentucky, and my Virginia-born mother used to always call them juncles, and it was jarring the first time I ever heard somebody say daffodil for that particular flower.

But here’s what we can tell you about those flowers.

Both of them, daffodils and jonquils, belong to the botanical genus called Narcissus.

And you may remember from Greek mythology that Narcissus was the guy who was really, really handsome, and he was transfixed by his own image in a pond.

He couldn’t tear himself away.

He was just looking down into this pond like a mirror, and that’s where we get the word narcissist, by the way.

Yes, yes.

And these flowers often bloom near ponds, and so that’s part of the reason that they’re called narcissus.

Daffodils is a general term for all of those flowers in the genus narcissus, and jonquils are a specific variety of narcissus.

They’re called narcissus jonquilus in the Latin nomenclature.

Okay.

Yeah, so daffodil is the general term and jonquil is the specific term for that particular kind of flower.

But, you know, Claudia, when it comes to names of flowers and sometimes names of foods, those names are just really slippery, the colloquial names for them.

And I mean, that’s why the Linnaean classification system is so helpful in identifying specifically what a flower is, because a lot of people use those terms interchangeably, jonquil and daffodil.

Okay.

Well, I’ve never heard anyone else call them a jonquil.

And but that was that was what we called them.

And to this day, and this was all a long time ago, but I feel when I see them blooming in the spring, the first thing that comes to my mind is that, oh, the jangles are blooming.

And then I stop myself when I’m in a group of people to say, nope, nobody else knows what a jangle is.

I have to call them a daffodil.

Claudia, I do, I do.

And a lot of other people do.

I do too.

Particularly in the south.

A lot of people call them John Quills.

Some people have called them Johnny Quills, which I think is really cute.

Okay.

I’ve not heard that term before.

Claudia, thank you so much for sharing your story with us.

We really appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

All right.

Take care of yourself.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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