"The daffodils are out early this year," I observed to a friend earlier this week. This seemingly inconsequential remark set off an unexpected chain of consequences. The first was a stinging attack on my masculinity by my friend, who supposes it not to be bloke-y to notice when flowers bloom. The attack will only be renewed, one imagines, if she ever reads this. The second was, as so often, a moment of doubt, quite unrelated to the masculinity question (about which I'm confident, even if no one else is). After all, the only thing I knew about the blooming daffodil was that its blooming (or blowth) usually occurs on the feast of Saint David, patron saint of Wales. This, I understood, was why the little flower is so called - after Dafydd ... wasn't it? Two short minutes with the Collins dictionary and I was less worried about my masculinity than my literacy.

First off, Dafydd, as in hindsight I well knew, sounds nothing like the first two syllables of daffodil - it's pronounced davith. So it's not surprising that the name plays no part in the etymology of the word. Daffodil in fact comes ultimately from a Greek word asphodelos, through Latin asphodelus, landing up in English as affodil and then daffodil and used interchangeably for a while. (No one really knows where the d- comes from. It might be from the Dutch definite article - "de affodil", from French "de" - "fleur d'afrodille", or from English "and" - by confusion over sentences such as "lilies and affodils".)

Here comes the botany. The plant given the name daffodil and affodil, says the OED, was "originally and properly" the asphodel, a southern European plant which doesn't really look like the daffodil that we would recognise as such. The two were confused, the OED says - without, it should be said, much conviction - "due apparently to the application to both plants, at their first introduction to England, of the fanciful name laus tibi". The pedants got very aerated about this confusion for a while, but later accepted the term "daffodil" to refer to what botanists call narcissus pseudonarcissus, with affodil referring to the asphodel (and later falling out of use when the term asphodel was reintroduced).

But have another look at the scientific name for the daffodil (or yellow narcissus, or Lent lily) - why pseudo-narcissus? There doesn't seem to be any scientific sense in which the daffodil is not a "real" narcissus, but sadly my knowledge of the history of Linnaean taxonomy is not what it might be. If anyone does know where the pseudo comes from, I'd love to hear it. (Another friend tells me that to refer to white narcissi as "daffodils" is to court death at London's Columbia Road flower market. Being a butch manly sort, I've never tried.)

There's plenty more to say about the daffodil - such as that Narcissus and Asphodelos are both Greek mythical references, or that the plant is poisonous. But the main lesson I'm taking away is that one's understanding of the real world can be seriously distorted by a half-arsed, inaccurate understanding of etymology. I thought the daffodils were out early because I thought they had an etymological connection with Saint David's day, and that informed my understanding of when they should flower. (Having now discovered the science of phenology, I still think the daffodils are out early, but it doesn't stop the original remark being the apex of ignorance.)

I'll leave you, if it's not too vulgarly macho, with the related intelligence that the National Trust is celebrating snowdrop weekend tomorrow and Sunday in various of its properties. Enjoy.