On my first visit to Germany, three elderly British tourists asked me for help finding the elevator button to get down to the ground floor: “Is it this one marked ‘E’?” I said yes, it was—the E standing for the German word for “ground.” Erd is, just as it sounds, a cognate of English “Earth.” The German for strawberry is Erdbeer, literally “earth-berry;” peanut is Erdnuß, “earth-nut.” Or “ground-berry,” if you prefer, and “ground-nut.” They’re sometimes called “groundnuts” in English, too, although nobody, as far as I know, ever says “groundberry.” If Erd can translate either “Earth” or “ground,” does German also have one single word for English “sky” and “Heaven”? Yes; that word is Himmel. But though the German name for the raspberry is Himbeer, there is no Himnuß, and anyway even Himbeer itself has no actual etymological connection to Himmel. Consider “Him” a mere coincidence here, if you happen to be someone who believes in coincidences. (Are you, by the way?) On the other hand, raspberries do grow, I suppose, up in the air, to some extent—in comparison, at least, to the Erdbeeren sweetly ripening down there amongst the summer straw.

It is interesting that peanuts and strawberries go together so naturally in a culinary way, as well as linguistically.

But if there had been a relationship between Heaven and Him of the berry, if there were something called a Himnuß, maybe it would grow on a tree whose thin twisting brambly branches held it high above the ground. We would perhaps occasionally confound its German name with Latin hymnus—might enjoy its flavor best in combination with raspberries, which in that case we might sometimes even call skyberries.