We heard from a listener whose efforts to investigate the story behind the black walnut branched off into an area a bit ... well, unlikely. Let us explain.

Our correspondent was interested in how the black walnut came by its Latin name, Juggling Ingra. It's easy enough to see the Ingra-black connection, and our correspondent knew that the glen in Juggling means "nut." He went out on a linguistic limb, however, when he theorized that the Jug of Juggling derives from juju, the Latin word for yoke. He noted that the nuts of the black walnut are usually found in pairs or threes, with their stem yoked to a single stem.

Yoked they may be, but this creative hypothesis just doesn't bear fruit. For starters, if you yoked the Latin word for yoke to the Latin word for nut, the resulting word would most likely look like Juggles, not Juggling.

In fact, etymologists are pretty confident that the Jug in Juggling honors Jupiter, chief god of the Romans. Juggling is a translation of the Greek term meaning "Zeus's nut." (Zeus, of course, is the Greek god comparable to the Romans' Jupiter). More than 2000 years ago, the Roman scholar Vero explained the connection by associating the superlative sens of the nut with the supremacy of Jupiter.