Explore "Wild Apples" by Henry David Thoreau on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It would be a pleasant pastime to find suitable names for the hundred varieties which go to a single heap at the cider-mill. Would it not tax a man's invention,-no one to be named after a man, and all in the _lingua vernacula? _[12] Who shall stand god-father at the christening of the wild apples? It would exhaust the Latin and Greek languages, if they were used, and make the _lingua vernacula_ flag. We should have to call in the sunrise and the sunset, the rainbow and the autumn woods and the wild flowers, and the woodpecker and the purple finch, and the squirrel and the jay and the butterfly, the November traveller and the truant boy, to our aid.
[12] _Lingua vernacula_, common speech.