Taken with iPhone © Frank H. Jump
Taken with iPhone © Frank H. Jump
Sometimes the iPhone camera surprises me.
The terms “Mushroom” and “Toadstool” go back centuries and were never precisely defined, nor was there consensus on application.
The term “toadstool” was often, but not exclusively, applied to poisonous mushrooms or to those that have the classic umbrella-like cap-and-stem form. Between 1400 and 1600 A.D., the terms tadstoles, frogstooles, frogge stoles, tadstooles, tode stoles, toodys hatte, paddockstool, puddockstool, paddocstol, toadstoole, and paddockstooles sometimes were used synonymously with mushrom, mushrum, muscheron, mousheroms, mussheron, or musserouns.
The word has apparent analogies in Dutch padde(n)stoel (toad-stool/chair, mushroom) and German Krötenschwamm (toad-fungus, alt. word for panther cap). Others have proposed a connection with German “Todesstuhl” (lit. “death’s chair”). Since Tod is a direct cognate to death, in that case it would be a German borrowing. – Wikipedia
