Mangos and Green Peppers

So Eric and I started talking about Krissy's post about green peppers earlier this week. He said that his grandmother (note another grandparent in coversation) used to call green peppers mangos as well. This resulted in me doing some googling. I found several different web pages that all stated about the same thing;

GREEN PEPPERS AND MANGOS The word ‘mango’ is used in some areas to refer to green peppers or stuffed green peppers. Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri...........Usage of 'mango' for green peppers seems to have originated with coal miners in eastern Pennsylvania (1870s +) - and spread with the mining industries, and then with the miners families as they migrated to new areas and found new jobs. But why the word 'mango' for green peppers? Many of these coal miners were of Eastern European origin, and it has been suggested that the word may have a Slovak origin. The English 'dialect' of the Appalachian region with its unique pronunciation, grammar, and word usage is due in large part to the immigration of miners, engineers and others from so many countries coming together in one area and being relatively isolated in the small mining towns. They came from Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Germany, Scotland, Wales, Greece, Turkey, and Syria to name a few - so the word 'mango' might have been adapted from one of these languages. Also, in many old cookbooks, 'mango' would sometimes be used to refer to a pickle, especially of melons or cucumber (resembling pickled green mango?) 'Mango' was also a term sometimes used to refer to cantaloupe in many old cookbooks)............

I learned something new today.......one article even stated that this is common in southern Ohio. Calling green mangos green peppers is something that I won't be doing anytime soon, but maybe the westside isn't as backwards as people think afterall.