Is the Moon made of cheese?

While on the moon, don’t forget to try the stuff it is made of: cheese.

This bizarre notion comes from a Servian folklore in which a simpleton is made to believe that the reflection of the moon in the river is made of greene (it has no relation to the colour, it merely means “new” or “unripened”) cheese.

The notion has since found mention in John Keynes’s General Theory, DuckTales, NASA even released images of the moon made of greene cheese (so what if it was on April 1, 2002). Google Moon actually used swiss cheese patterns for zoomed images of moon, before high-res images were a common feature.

Cheese although is one of those words which has an unknown origin. Maybe it came from Italian “cacio” or Spanish “queso” or maybe it came from Latin, “casein or caesus” which is a protein which causes milk to coagulate. Or maybe from the French “fromage” meaning moulded.

And that’s the lesson here. Sometimes no matter how bad you want two things to relate and make sense, they just don’t. Even homonyms like “cheesy” meaning cheap is unrelated to cheese as we know it. It was picked up by British soldiers in India from the Urdu “cheez or chiz” which simply meant “a thing or something showy”. Language, like humans, can be complex. But unlike “human problems”, as showed Dexter, a linguistic conundrum is rarely solved by chanting “omelette du fromage”.