I would have thought that I'd have had in the hopper all the senses, proper and improper, of "'stopper." But I've come a-cropper.
The most familiar stopper is, of course, the blocker of liquids, as for example the cork that fits into the top of the wine bottle — or the polished glass stopper that used to slide into those old-fashioned ink bottles. And then there's the stopper in baseball — the ace pitcher, the "number one" on the staff, who brings a losing streak to a close. And also the show-stopper — the performer who freezes the show in its tracks, so excellently that he or she earns several rounds of applause and encores. (Latterly, a supremely attractive woman has come to be called a "show-stopper"; when she enters a room all activities, even molecular motion itself, immediately cease).
But down here in South Florida, where I am enjoying a few days of indolent hedonism, there's a stopper of which even the OED is ignorant. It's a plant — a bush or small tree. The best known stopper is the simpson, myricanthes fragrans, demotically known to all as the nakedwood twinberry. It's a member of the eucalyptus family and smells nutmeggy. The fruit is edible, as might be expected of a distant cousin of the guava. Simpson stoppers are a food of choice for Florida's state bird (not the pelican, as one might expect, but the mockingbird). And there are other stoppers beside the aristocratic simpson: the redberry stopper Eugenia foetida, whose leaves and flowers are foul-smelling; the white stopper; and the inedible Spanish stopper.
I have no clue about the etymology of "stopper" in this sense. Neither does anyone else.
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