There’s something funny and at the same time biting about telling someone: “you’re so unique empty pumpkin!”. But where does this observation, sometimes used lightly, really come from regarding someone who it doesn’t particularly shine wit? It seems that the idea comes from a long time ago, the fruit of popular, linguistic and even botanical wisdom. In the past, pumpkins were dried, then emptied and a container made to store the salt which in the past was considered a very precious asset and therefore synonymous with wealth. Being able to store salt in a pumpkin therefore indicated intelligence and common sense.
Already two thousand years ago, salt was one of the most sought after minerals that could be traded in the Roman Empire, so much so that it was nicknamed “white gold” The term salaryin fact, derives precisely from the payment of workers through doses of salt, a very precious element not only for nutrition or for flavoring dishes, but for the preservation of valuable and particular foods (think, for example, of Roman garum).
In those times there were, among other things, quite a few difficulties related to the transport of goods and the preservation of food, especially if it was a mineral that was difficult to collect in case it was mistakenly dispersed; this risk represented not only an economic tragedy but also a sign of bad luck which still remains today. This is therefore due to the need to protect such a valuable asset, the particular idea of using one was born pumpkinwhose cultivation was widespread at the time and was therefore easily available: emptied of the pulp and with an exterior resistant to humidity, it proved to be the perfect home chest where to allocate the precious salt.
Initially, therefore, those who had a sense of wisdom were considered wealthy and, in a certain sense, endowed with common sense and judgment to be able to preserve this wealth. This expression refers to a concrete custom over time it has transformed into metaphor reinforcing the negative meaning: if the pumpkin is empty, it means that one is poor and the content is missing, i.e. the head, intelligence, thus referring to naive people with a lack of common sense.
This connection is also easier to understand if you consider that the Latin term “cocutia”, according to the Zanichelli dictionary, referred to “pumpkin” as a fruit, but its etymology also meant “head“. This term later evolved through intermediate forms such as “cocutia” and “cocuzza“, until it became the word “pumpkin” that we use today. After all, the adjective “insipid” defines a person who knows nothing, while tastyfrom the late Latin sapĭdus, derivative of sapere ‘to have taste; to be wise’, means witty, endowed with wit. Furthermore, the Italian language has used this term for centuries as a joking synonym of testa: among expressions such as “out of your pumpkin”, “zuccone”, “to be a hard pumpkin”, the figure of pumpkin like container.
Today the expression “empty pumpkin” survives in colloquial languagemostly used in an ironic or good-natured tone which, depending on the context, can sound like a slight insult. It is one of those countless phrases that were born in our peasant and practical past and that still resist in the age of digital content, serving as a reminder of how it is better to fill one’s head with real contentthan of empty words.
