11.23.08
Posted in English origins, Old English, foreign sources (general) at 9:55 am by Bill Brohaugh
It’s a food day today, what with me cooking my entry in the finals of a local Cook Like a Wokstar contest (I admit that my interest in entering may have been influenced by the pun). So the theme today is food; and because this immediately follows yesterday’s debunking of a false etymology of a place name, we’ll throw more place-name chat in, as well, in this excerpt from Everything You Know About English Is Wrong
:
Chili peppers hot,
Chile peppers cold,
Chilly peppers in the pot, nine centuries old.
This, of course, is a recast of the old “pease porridge” nursery rhyme, infused with a different set of concepts to make a point about the verbal porridge representing the relationship between chili peppers, the country of Chile, and the chilly reception you’ll get from etymologists if you suggest that any of these words are connected.
Chili peppers hot: Chili (the pepper and ultimately the stew made with the pepper) traces back through Spanish to the native South American Nahuatl word for the pepper plant. It is not, as Dutch physician and botanist Jacobus Bontius wrote in 1631, a “quasi dicas Piper e Chile” (“named as if a pepper from Chile,” if my Latin translation is anywhere in the same hemisphere as the actual meaning, but then again, remember that I tried to translate “E Pluribus Unum” by myself as a kid, and could only come up with “made of lead”).
Chile peppers cold: One might say that the etymological trail to Chile has grown cold. Though we’re not sure how the country name originated, no possibilities connect it with the hot pepper plant, and one possibility even suggests that it comes from native tchili, meaning “snow,” from the native South American language Aymara, or a word from the native South American language Quecha: chili meaning “cold” or “snow” or, yes, “chilly.” But even so:
Chilly peppers in the pot, nine centuries old: Our adjective chilly and its source noun chill, meaning “cold,” traces all the way back to Old English. And just to confuse matters, one early spelling of chill was chile.
Why do I spend so much time disassociating chili and Chile and chilly? Well, I hail from the Cincinnati area, where a favorite local dish is a bed of spaghetti, topped with a spiced meat sauce (cinnamon and chocolate or cocoa among the spices), chopped onions, beans and grated cheese [recipe from Cincinnati chef Paul Sturkey here]. This dish is “Cincinnati chili,” and it, too, has nothing to do with any of the aforementioned chilis.
Yes, you Texans and Mexicans and Chileans, we know this concoction is not “real” chili, and, by gosh, we don’t care.
Permalink
11.22.08
Posted in English origins, eponyms, foreign sources (general), myths and misconceptions, word history at 10:06 am by Bill Brohaugh
Rachel Maddow on Friday night (11/21/08) gave some unintended linguistic truth to her regular “Ms. Information” segment title with coverage of a project called The Atlas of True Names. Said atlas labels countries, regions and cities not with their current names but with what the names supposedly mean. Much of the atlas’s labelings are true; many of them are misinformed. For instance, Maddow swallowed whole the atlas’s claim about the origin of Yucatan:
Apparently Spanish explorers asked, “What’s the name of this region?” And the local Mayans responded by saying, “Yuk ak atan,” which means, “I don’t understand.” And so the Spanish named the place Yucatan. They named the place “I Don’t Understand”! If ever there were a more perfect summary of colonialism, I do not know of it.
Well, Rachel still does not know of it. On hearing this claim, my etymological Spidey-sense began tingling, because the tale has bullshitternet notymology written (and mapped) all over it. It sounded like a number of nonsense derivations I mock in Everything You Know About English Is Wrong. Everything you know about cartography is wrong, too.
There are a number of theories of how Yucatan took its name, and Language Log, quick to the fore, discusses them and other fallacies and misinterpretations perpetrated by The Atlas of True Names. The Yuca-yarn is very much in the spirit of other canards as the kangaroo taking its name from, again, natives responding “I don’t understand” to a naming question. The logical fallacy is that such explanations imply that the one and only time explorers heard “I don’t understand” as a response was when asking one specific question. How were all the other questions answered?
I’m fascinated by one “I don’t know” etymological response that likely is kinda-sorta true, however. At Language Log, Benjamin Zimmer writes:
Similarly, the story that the name of the Alaskan town of Nome comes from a phrase meaning “I don’t know” (ki-no-me) goes back to 1905 at least. A 1901 letter by George Davidson (recently noted here by Jon Weinberg) provides another popular theory, that the map notation ? Name was misread as C. Nome (for Cape Nome). (The Nome Convention and Visitor Bureau accepts this derivation.)
Some native Alaskan likely did not say “I don’t know,” but some cartographer likely did admit he/she didn’t know by writing “? Name.” Either way, all dunnos lead to Nome.
Permalink
10.11.08
Posted in English origins, Greek sources, Latin sources, foreign sources (general), myths and misconceptions, word history at 6:17 am by Bill Brohaugh
I’ve recently encountered a bit of confusion about the word personality—a subject of jealous interest of mine since I myself have no personality.
One bit of confusion I found at wilderdom.com, a site about something, though I’m not sure what:
Personality comes from the Greek word “persona”, meaning “mask”
The word ‘personality’ derives from the Latin word ‘persona’ which means ‘mask’. The study of personality can be understood as the study of ‘masks’ that people wear. These are the personas that people project and display, but also includes the inner parts of psychological experience which we collectively call our ‘self’.
Greek, Latin, Babylonian—hell, just toss out any ancient language origin. How about “Etruscan,” while we’re at it?
Turns out that yes, the origin described in nonboldfaced type is correct. The word persona is Latin. But now there’s a seed of doubt. Just as it isn’t Greek, perhaps it also doesn’t mean “mask.” Could that be true? Let’s ask some language experts: Kathlyn and Gay Hendricks, who say—
The English word ‘personality’ comes from two Latin words, per and sona, “through sound.” The Romans knew that the personality comes through in the tone of voice and other vocal aspects.
Well, that sounds good and all, but the word actually comes from one Latin word—persona—meaning, yes, “mask.” Think Dramatis Personae—the theatrical cast of characters. And, no, persona likely didn’t itself result from a “sounds-like” origin, as it probably came from Etruscan (gasp!)—the word phersu, also meaning “mask.”
Still, I’m very forgiving of language experts Kathlyn and Gay Hendricks, because they are actually body language experts, and they brought up the personality factor in analyzing the decipherable body language of one Sarah Palin. (At least her body language is decipherable, as her verbal language is hardly that.)
So I leave you with Kathlyn and Gay to analyze some bodyspeak from a current “personality” (read: mask-wearer) in this interesting article.
Permalink
09.21.08
Posted in English origins, French sources, Spanish sources, foreign sources (general), unfortunate English at 9:12 am by Bill Brohaugh
Already, the grog hangovers from celebrating International Talk Like a Pirate Day (TLAPD) a couple of days back are threatening to subside in the next week or two. Had we only eaten before such drinking—had we only partaken of the traditional buccaneer feast that I hinted at in yesterday’s post before imbibing, we might be less hung over, and a little pleasantly fatter, as well.
I propose that the traditional feast for TLAPD involves initials of a sort itself: BBQ. Here’s why, in the vein of my Unfortunate English: The Gloomy Truth Behind the Words You Use
:
Which of the following is most notorious in the world of piracy: The pirate Blackbeard? Or the buccaneer Redmeat?
Redmeat is neither pirate nor buccaneer, of course. I’m referring to the artery-clogging red meat, the eating of which is in some circles both politically and gastronically incorrect. Before Blackbeard was spilling the blood of his victims from 1713 to 1718, the buccaneers were spilling the blood of wild red-meat oxen and wild the-other-white-meat boars in the Caribbean. And dining well. Caribbean natives used wood (and later metal) frameworks for various purposes, among them sleeping (to avoid snakes) and curing and roasting meat. Speakers of the native Carribbean language Tupi called such a framework a mukem. French explorers adapted the word as boucan, and people who used them to cook on were boucaniers. (Native Haitians used similar frameworks, which in the language Taino were called babricots. The Spanish adopted this word as barbacoa, which led to our word barbecue.)
The boucaniers moved from redmeatish pursuits to Blackbeardish pursuits, and were known by the late 1600s in English as buccaneers. Did they consult their food pyramids before all that pillaging?
For more information on the source of the word barbecue that will hurt your head even more than a grog hangover, consult my previous post on the topic, matey.
Permalink
06.28.08
Posted in English origins, foreign sources (general), humor, letters and characters, persnickitors, punctuation at 8:42 am by Bill Brohaugh
I recall, in slightly fictionalized fashion, a book reviewer chastising a particular anal book of prescriptivistic grammar (”Split that infinitive and die, mongrel dog!”—though that’s perhaps being unfair in the mildness of my paraphrase). The reviewer’s complaint was that said prescriptivist had failed at his own stated level of prescriptivism in using an unaccented E in cliche. The dullard! Without the accent, we’d all be pronouncing it “clitch!” Or some such nonsense that I’m exaggerating. Maybe. This incident seemed to me to be something of the wits chucking nits at each other in wit-nitted battle.
In general, English is strongly accepting of original spelling of its adopted loanwords: rendezvous is my typical example. English isn’t so quick to retain unusual characters like the cedilla (in françois, literally and by way of illustration), the tilde (not your great aunt’s middle name, but the swoopy symbol in mañana and the target of a Nike swoop-infringement suit), or the umlaut (the two dots orbiting the proper name Schröder like Deimos and Phobos, but not like Deimös and Phöbös).
Abandoning such non-English conventions is just fine with me, as I’m a strong believer in the fact that we don’t speak non-English when speaking English—and that applies to the written version, as well. So when the persnickitors (including the automated persnickitor in Microsoft Word) start harrumphing that cliche is a misspelling, I return the harrumph. Is that naive of me?, I ask as I see the persnickitors twitch. You’re not naive! You’re naïve!
Well, maybe I’m both, but I’m also aware of not only the lack of necessity but also the problems of trying to cling to what is for us unusual character sets. Quick, run to your typewriter and find the two-dots-above-the-I key. Not right in front of you? Not in front of me, and in fact I had to turn to a special text-editing program to get access to ANSI character 239(EF). Intuitive, eh?
And then there’s this I spotted on the web:
Depending on HTML code and web browsers to properly interpret some of these character sets is neither naive nor naïve—it is ny-eeeee! I find juvenile pleasure in knowing that the symbol signals “phonological diaeresis.”
Equally quickly, without looking, which way do the accents go on the noun resume: résumè, rèsumé, rësumê, rèçumæ?
I’m certainly not the first writer to campaign for dispensing with foreign characters. Here’s Woody Allen, tongue-in-cheek, of course, in a piece called “Lovborg’s Women Considered” in Without Feathers:
Born in Stockholm in 1836, Lovborg (originally Lövborg, until, in later years, he removed the two dots from above the o and placed them over his eyebrows) began writing plays at the age of fourteen.
There are other good uses for such now-obsolute typographical gymnastics. Here’s Steve Martin, following the lead of the fictional Mr. Lovborg, writing about a supposed shortage of typographical periods in the font style known as Times Roman:
“Most vulnerable are writers who work in short, choppy sentences,” said a spokesperson for Times Roman, who continued, “We are trying to remedy the situation and have suggested alternatives, like umlauts, since we have plenty of umlauts—and, in fact, have more umlauts than we could possibly use in a lifetime! Don’t forget, umlauts can really spice up a page with their delicate symmetry—resting often midway in a word, letters spilling on either side—and not only indicate the pronunciation of a word but also contribute to a writer’s greater glory because they’re fancy, not to mention that they even look like periods, indeed, are indistinguishable from periods, and will lead casual readers to believe that the article actually contains periods!”
Ö!
Permalink
. Feel free to 
