On tamarind

It all began with the simple question of what part of the world tamarind originally came from.

The etymology (from Gernot Katzer's Spice Pages):

"...In Arabic tamr-hindi simply means “date of India” (“date” being a general name for the fruits of various palm trees); needless to say, tamarind neither stems from India nor is it related to palm trees. In spite of this deficiency, loan translations of this name have made their way into English, German (Indische Dattel) and Russian (Indiyskiy finik).
The term "date" itself came to English via Old Provençal datil and allegedly goes back to Greek daktylos “finger”; this naming, obviously motivated by shape resemblance, seems even more fit for tamarind than for true dates..."

So it turns out that the the actual origin of tamarind is in Eastern Africa, even though it grows all over the tropics. Coooool!

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[Aside: despite the same spelling, "date" (as in 2nd October 2004) has a very different etymology - "In ancient Latin, the date of a letter was expressed thus ‘Dabam Romæ prid. Kal. Apr.’, i.e. ‘I gave or delivered (this) at Rome on the 31st March’, for which the later formula was ‘Data Romæ, given at Rome’, etc. Hence data the first word of the formula was used as a term for the time and place therein stated." (from the Oxford English Dictionary)]