A few weeks back I was reading a bedtime story to my elementary-school daughter, Ananya, when we came across the word
sherbert.
"It's spelled incorrectly. It should be
sherbet," I said.
"Uh-uh, it's correct. That's how everyone in my class says it," she said.
Never missing an opportunity to talk about a word, I launched into a little history lesson for
sherbet. The word is from Arabic, but it took a scenic
route to English. It stopped by Persian and Turkish before reaching the
shores of the English language. In Arabic
šarbat is a drink. (By the way,
the word
syrup is a cousin of this word.)