Meaning
Something desired precisely because it is off-limits - a pleasure whose attraction comes largely from being illicit. The phrase explains the pull of the banned book, the closed bar, and the unsuitable partner alike. Universal and lightly worn; note that Genesis names no fruit - the apple is art and translation, not scripture - and that the sweetness proverb is the phrase's proverbial cousin. Regional use: General English; Biblical origin.
Origin
Genesis 2:17 forbids the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and the serpent's persuasion does the rest; the Quran's account of a single forbidden tree runs in parallel. The Bible never names the fruit - Hebrew peri means simply fruit - and the candidates argued ever since include the grape (Rabbi Meir's choice, for the wine), the fig (they sewed fig leaves), the pomegranate, and wheat. The apple is a linguistic accident: the Old French pom narrowed from meaning any fruit to meaning apple, and the image spread through twelfth-century French art and, decisively, through Hans Brosamer's apple woodcut in Martin Luther's 1550 Bible, spread by the new printing presses; a Latin pun between malum, evil, and malum, apple, is often blamed, though Azzan Yadin-Israel has shown Latin writers preferred pomum. Early Christian writers from Tertullian onward compared the story to Pandora's jar. Wiktionary records the settled figurative senses - illicit pleasure, and something desired that cannot be had - along with the derived proverb that forbidden fruit is the sweetest, and grapefruit was itself first marketed as the forbidden fruit of Barbados.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- forbidden fruit is the sweetest
- taste the forbidden fruit
- the tree of knowledge
Usage Examples
- The banned title became the shop's bestseller overnight, forbidden fruit doing its usual work.
- Her parents' disapproval made him forbidden fruit, which the romance then required three years to survive.
- Every January the locked biscuit tin turns into forbidden fruit, and every February it is found empty.