Purple passion right out in public

I wanted to write about lovely fall colors but instead I'm distracted by words. Nature is doing a strip-tease in our woods, complete with fluffy white fans and garish pink fleshy fruits. What are they? 

My birding-and-botanizing colleague identifies this as euonymus atropurpureus, which sounds almost obscene but means, essentially, "purple bush." It's also called bitter ash, eastern wahoo, and Hearts Bursting with Love, which sounds great until you learn that the poisonous fruits were formerly used as a purgative, so that's one case of heartburn you won't soon forget.

But what about wahoo? Chief Wahoo is the Cleveland Indians' (probably offensive) logo, and the wahoo is also, according to Wikipedia, a fish, and not just any fish but  a scombrid fish, whatever that means, known in some parts of the world as the ono or peto, a warm-water mackerel often parasitized by the Hirudinella ventricosa, which sounds much more appetizing than giant stomach worm.

But the wahoo in my woods is clearly not a fish, so that's no help at all. (And if there are any giant stomach worms in my woods, I don't want to know about it.) When I look up wahoo elsewhere, I'm told that it's the common name for the euonymus atropurpureus, which takes me right back where I started, which was an attempt to applaud nature for her colorful strip-tease. Three cheers for  euonymus atropurpureus! My heart bursts with admiration.