Current Events > who the fuck named artichokes

(+) Yeah! (+)

and thought putting "choke" in the name was good idea?
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https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/artichoke#Etymology
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Well if you don't remove the prickly flower inside you could choke on it. I doubt that's it's origin though. Artichokes are a pain in the ass to cook and you don't get much out of them. But they are damn tasty.
Traveled through the "artichoke capital of the world" Castroville last year incidentally. Pretty nice city. Miles of the things growing all around. Nasty looking plants.
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Maybe some guy named Arthur choked on one while they named it.
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The ancestor of our word "artichoke" comes from the opposite side of the Mediterranean from Greece: Arab-occupied Spain. There, the western Arabic word for an artichoke-y plant, al-karsufa (al in Arabic just means "the"), turned into the Spanish alcarchofa. This worked its way to Northern Italy, where it got turned into articiocco, most likely because ciocco was the local word for "stump," and arti- was a version of our prefix "arch," meaning "high" (and the artichoke plant does have a big stumpy mass up high).

Articiocco then worked its way into English, and like the Italians before them, English speakers tended to make up associations for the word. Some called it a "hartichoke," since it looked like a heart; others assumed that the "choke" part had something to do with the hard-to-breathe meaning of "choke," either because you'd choke if you ate the middle of the plant, or because it grew so fast that it would choke out all the other growth around it. All of this was wrong, of course, since it really came from Arabic via Italian. But facts rarely get in the way of a common-sense folk etymology.
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