Pepper
To pepper you with questions is to send a barrage, a torrent, a lot of questions fast and not even waiting for the answers. To pepper your spaghetti is to shake on the amount of that spice that you prefer and that could be very little. A pepper is a vegetable that you can grow in your garden. They are spicy to the taste and can be hot or cool or even sweet (red ones). The more bland peppers are the green ones in your quiche
Jalapeno peppers are very hot (for me). There are many levels of ‘hot’ when it comes to peppers. Habanera peppers are way hot, but are old school on the full scale of how hot a pepper can be. The Trinidad Moruga Scorpian was the hottest until 2012. The Trinidad 7 Pot is so hot that just one pepper is enough to spice seven pots of chili. We now have the Carolina Reaper which made the Guinness Book of Records as the hottest pepper in the world.
The measure of the hotness of a pepper is based on a measure of the amount of the chemical capsaicin. In Australia peppers are called capsicum. If we set the baseline of a bell pepper at zero, then Jalapeno ranges between 3500 and 10,000. Cayenne rates between 30,000 and 50,000, Habenero between 100,000 and 350,000 and our Carolina Reaper tops out the hottest category at between 855,000 and 2,480,000. That is one hot pepper!
Pepper is also a name used, suggesting diminutive and lively. Someone might be described having salt and pepper hair, indicating a mix of speckles of black and gray throughout. If I cook something and spice it with salt and pepper, then put the leftovers in the freezer, when I take it out and reheat it, the salt taste is diminished, the pepper taste is stronger. The pepper we add to our meals is ground from a peppercorn (fruit of the black pepper shrub)
To pepper something is to sprinkle it with tiny bits of, of whatever we want. The lawn may appear peppered with dandelion flowers. I could pepper my cereal with chocolate chips (yum). The thing that is used to pepper something is meant to accent it and just a little bit is about right. We can pepper our writing with ‘aggression’ or whatever we wish. Pepper to spice up, attract attention, stuff like that