What most people in the west call “pepper” doesn’t come from a pepper
plant at all but from a flowering vine. The term is an adaptation of
pippali, a Malayalam word that originally referred to the fruits of a
plant in the same family commonly known as Indian long pepper. To add to
the confusion, people began to erroneously apply the word “pepper” to
the hot chili pepper of the Capsicum genus discovered in the New World
in the 1700s.
Although mistakenly mixing species in this manner may have upset the
botanical purists of the time, the error led to an interesting
etymological development in this case. Because of the fiery attributes
of either spice called “pepper,” the word became synonymous with “high
spirited” and was used to describe someone who was considered robust and
energetic. This is how we arrived at the modern word “peppy,” later
abbreviated to simply “pep.”
