Epazote for your Epizooties

My parents, who grew up in the 1940s in Ohio, spoke a word the other day that I did not recall having ever heard before. First my dad said it, then my mom confirmed it: "epizooties." The context was medical: something like, "Don't eat that, or you'll get a bad case of the epizooties."

My first thought was the word "epazote," an herb popular in Mexican cuisine. It's one of the herbs that I heard well-known Mexican chef Aquiles Chávez jokingly call the "hierbas nacas," along with cilantro and yerbabuena, as opposed to the "hierbas finas," such as basil, rosemary, or dill. After all, the idea that consumption of a Mexican foodstuff would have sickened an early 20th-century Ohioan, leading to the phrase "case of the epizooties," really isn't much of a stretch to imagine.

Besides, other Americanisms have Mexican origins, such as "jalopy," which derives from the Hispanicized spelling of one of my favorite Mexican cities, Xalapa (Jalapa), capital of the state of Veracruz. Just exactly how the association arose is hard to say. Maybe an early 20th-century convoy of beat-up Fords from Xalapa arrived in Texas to make an epic delivery of the better-known local etymological derivation: jalapeño peppers.

But no one sits down to eat a plate of epazote, just by itself. So I looked into the origin of "epizooties," and found that it comes from a French word (with Greek roots) for animal disease, or more specifically an epidemic afflicting a given animal population such as a herd of cattle. Cows, it should be noted, are certainly abundant in Ohio, and have been congregating there, so to speak, for at least a couple centuries. I've heard of bird flu and swine flu, but not cattle flu; in any case, maybe some cross-species bug, or just bovine sympathy, led to the phrase "you better rest, or you'll come down with a bad case of the epizooties, just like Bessie."

Unsatisfied with this explanation, I researched "epazote," which comes from the Spanish alteration of the Nahuatl "epazotl." I learned that the indigenous Mexican herb was often prescribed throughout the early 20th-century United States as a treatment for intestinal parasites, a fact which perhaps explains its vulgar-sounding English-language alternative moniker, "wormseed." This association with folk-healing brings me to propose a convergent etymology for the late 19th-to early 20th-century middle-America birth of the phrase "a case of the epizooties," deriving as much from a sickness (association to animal diseases) as from a cure (consuming epazote to get rid of parasites). Sometimes the remedy is worse than the disease, and the intestinal malaise caused by parasites reacting to epazote could have become regarded as a sickness itself.

As for me, I prefer the "hierbas nacas." All of them. With jalapeños.