Another example of this article being confidently wrong about tomato is Czech, where the word used is rajče or rajské jablko, the latter meaning "apple of paradise."

Same in Austrian German (Paradeiser) so perhaps something to do with it the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Hm, that's an interesting thought which never occurred to me until now. I didn't know about the Austrian German expression, but paradicsom in Hungarian can mean either tomato or paradise! Please chime in if you're familiar with other languages of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Edited to add: According to Wikipedia [0], the original Hungarian expression was also "apple of paradise," which then got shortened to just paradiscom. It also points out that the Italian pomodoro is literally "apple of gold." I guess the far-flung origins were thought of as paradisical...

[0] https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradicsom_(n%C3%B6v%C3%A9nyfa...

https://64.media.tumblr.com/d6de5bcddb77eae9d76d370e5f62bce7... the "paradise" area seems to roughly align with the extent of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Yeah, pomodoro means "golden apple", paradicsom/Paradeiser comes from "paradise" (looks like Hungarians really like tomatos!), so nothing in common except that they start with "P" and the countries they are used in are roughly in the same region. Also, in Romanian a tomato is simply a "roșie" ("red") - Romanians apparently like to name fruit by their color, eggplants are called "vinete" ("purples").

well, we used to like them, but then the fantastic "long shelf life" variations came...