For the most part, the indexes in my cookbooks do include vegetables, along with "see specific vegetable types". So it's not as though there is something embarrassing about vegetables, requiring them to be hidden or ignored. But I do find the word somewhat awkward. It's ugly. The consonants are thick, the v, the g, the t, and the b. And the related words, vegetate, vegetative. Perhaps this is because the root is Latin, rather than Greek--I'm thinking of George Orwell's warning against too many Latin words, although since I don't know Greek, I can't say for sure, in this case, about vegetable.

As usual in these situations I turn to the dictionary, in this case a hard copy of the Random House unabridged c.1967. Under vegetable as a noun, we find not only definitions related to plants (any herbaceous plant whose parts are used for food) but, number 4, "a dull, spiritless, and uninteresting person." And the adjectival meanings include not only "characteristic of plants" but also, 10. "uneventful, dull, a vegetable existence."

How can this be? Especially since the Latin root, vegetare, means to quicken? (vegetare, to quicken, and abilis, able). Is it because some vegetables, the tubers and gourds, squashes and eggplants, are lumpish in appearance?

Perhaps the memory of your mother telling you to "eat your vegetables" brings an uneasy sense of an uneventful, dull existence. If you remain all your life under the thumb of your mother, perhaps this means that you are unable to quicken into a life of your own.

It may be I'm right that there is more to this vegetable business than meets the eye.