The Etymologicon

by Mark Forsyth

  The ancient Greek word boubalos was applied to some sort of African antelope. Then boubalos was changed to buffalo and applied to various kinds of domesticated oxen. That’s why you still have water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis). Any ox in Europe could once be called a buffalo.

  Then the same thing happened to buffalos that had happened to turkeys. Explorers arrived in North America, saw some bison, and wrongly assumed that they were the same species as the European ox. Biologically they aren’t related, and to this day scientists will become all tetchy if you call a bison a buffalo, but who cares? The name stuck.

  Now, let’s jump back across the Atlantic and take another look at those European oxen. They were called buffalo, but the name was often shortened to buff. European buffalo used to get killed and skinned and the leather that resulted was therefore known as buff, or buffe leather.

  This leather was very useful for polishing, which is why we still buff things until they shine. When something has been properly buffed it looks good, and from that we get the idea that people who spend too much time at the gym running around like crazed gerbils are buff.

  An odd thing about buff leather is that it’s rather pale and, in fact, looks very like human skin. That’s why naked people are referred to as being in the buff, because it looks as though they are dressed in buff leather.

  Some people really did dress in buff leather, as it’s a good strong material. For example, in the nineteenth century the uniform of the New York firefighters was made from buff and the firefighters themselves were often called buffs.

  The firefighters of New York were heroes. Everybody loves a good conflagration, and whenever a New York building started burning the buffs would be called and crowds of New Yorkers would turn out to cheer them on. People would travel across the city just to see a good fire, and schoolboys would become aficionados of the buffs’ techniques for putting them out. These devoted New York schoolboys became known as buffs. Thus the New York Sun said, in 1903, that:

  The buffs are men and boys whose love of fire, fire-fighting and firemen is a predominant characteristic.

  And that’s why to this day you have film buffs and music buffs and other such expert buffalos.

  On the far side of New York state, beside the Niagara River, is a whole city called Buffalo, which is a bit odd as there aren’t any bison there, and never have been. However, the Niagara River is very pretty, and the best guess about the origins of the city’s name is that Buffalo is a corruption of the French beau fleuve, or beautiful river. But imagine if there were bison in the city of Buffalo. Pigeons in London are called London pigeons. Girls in California are called California girls. So any bison that you found in Buffalo would have to be called Buffalo buffalos.

  Buffalos are big beasts and it’s probably best not to get into an argument with one. That’s why there’s an American slang verb to buffalo meaning to bully. This means that if you bullied bison from that large city on the Niagara River, you would be buffaloing Buffalo buffalos.

  But you can go further, and a linguist at the University of Buffalo did. He worked out that if bison from his native city, who were bullied by other bison from his native city, went and took their frustration out on still other bison from his native city, then:

  Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

  Confused? The grammar is easier if you compare it to this version:

  Buffalo bison [whom] Buffalo bison bully [then] bully Buffalo bison.

  It’s the longest grammatically correct sentence in the English language that uses only one word. Word buffs love it.

  Antanaclasis

  Rhetorically, the sentence Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo is antanaclasic, which means that it keeps using the same word in different senses. People have been playing around with antanaclasis since language began. The Romans thought up the Latin sentence:

  Malo malo malo malo.

  Which means:

  I would rather be in an apple tree than be a bad boy in trouble.

  But neither the Romans nor the bison of Buffalo can come close to what you can achieve in Chinese if you really set your mind to it. Chinese is an incredibly inflected language and you can change the meaning of a word by slightly changing the way you say it. When you add that advantage onto the principle behind Buffalo buffalos and malo malo, you can create something much longer. That’s how a Chinese-American linguist came up with a poem that, in Westernised script, reads like this:

  Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.

  Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.

  Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.

  Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.

  Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shī shì, shī shì shí shī shìshì.

  Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.

  Shíshì shī, Shì shī shì shì shíshì.

  Shíshì shì, Shì shī shì shí shì shí shī.

  Shí shí, shī shí shì shí shī, shí shí shí shī shī.

  Shì shì shì shì.

  Which means:

  In a stone den was a poet named Shi, who loved to eat lions, and had decided to eat ten.

  He often went to the market to hunt for lions.

  At ten o’clock precisely, ten lions had just arrived at the market.

  At that moment, Shi had just arrived at the market as well.

  Seeing those lions, he shot them with his arrows.

  He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.

  The stone den was wet, so he had his servant clean it.

  After the stone den was cleaned, he tried to eat those ten lions.

  When he ate, he realised the corpses were really ten stone lions.

  Try to explain this matter.

  That’s one hell of a case of antanaclasis. However, like the buffalo sentence, it makes no sense, even to the Chinese, unless it’s explained.

  China

  Westerners find it terribly hard to pronounce Chinese words, and the Chinese find it hard to pronounce ours. In the nineteenth century when British merchants were over in China trying to trade opium, they found that the locals couldn’t even say the word business, and instead pronounced it pidgin, which is why strange colonial dialects are still called pidgin English.

  And we’re so bad at pronouncing Chinese that when we want one of their phrases we don’t adopt them as we would a French one, we just give in and translate. Do you have any idea how to pronounce xi nao? Luckily, you don’t need to, as we translated it to brainwashing (it was originally a form of Buddhist meditation). We never lost face by trying to pronounce tiu lien, instead we took the phrase and translated it to lose face. As for Mao Tse Tung’s tsuh lao fu, we call them paper tigers.

  However, some Chinese words do get into the language, mostly because of the delicious food. These remain untranslated, which is generally a good thing. Kumquats and dim sum might sell more if English-speakers knew that they meant golden orange and touch the heart; however, fish brine would probably not sell as much as ketchup, odds and ends (basically leftovers) doesn’t sound as exotic as chop suey, and nobody would eat tofu if they knew that it meant rotten beans.

  However, as alien as the Chinese language may sound to Western ears, there are still some points where we can see that our languages connect, not because they are related (they aren’t) but because humans form languages in the same way, for example by imitation of sound. That’s why the Chinese word for cat is miau.

  And here’s a true oddity: the Chinese word for pay is pei.

  Coincidences and Patterns

  The Chinese for pay is pei, and the Farsi Iranian word for bad is bad. The Uzbek for chop is chop, and in the extinct Aboriginal language of Mbaram a dog was called a dog. The Mayan for hole is hole and th
e Korean for many is mani. When, in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, an Afghan wants to show you something, he will use the word show; and the ancient Aztecs used the Nahuatl word huel to mean well.

  Any idiot can deduce from this that all the languages of the world are related. However, anyone of reasonable intelligence will realise that they are just a bunch of coincidences. There are a lot of words and a lot of languages, but there are a limited number of sounds. We’re bound to coincide sometimes.

  To prove that two languages are related you need to show a pattern of changes. It’s not enough to say that the Latin word collis has a double L in it and so does hill. That wouldn’t convince anyone of anything. But it’s possible to show that hundreds of Latin words that begin with a hard C have German and English equivalents that begin with an H. Moreover, you discover that the rest of the consonants are pretty much unchanged. So the Latin cornu translates to Old German and English as horn. If you can show a pattern of changes, then you can be pretty damned sure that the languages are related. Let’s give it a go.

  So the English horn of hounds would be the cornu canum and the horn of a hundred hounds would be the cornu centum canum and the hundred-headed hound with horns would be canis centum­ capitum cum cornibus. And the …

  Well, you get the idea.

  The C to H shift that separates Latin from German is part of a group of shifts known as Grimm’s Law, because they were set out by Jacob Grimm, who was one of the Brothers Grimm and who spent most of his time collecting fairy tales.

  There are other parts to Grimm’s Law; for example, Ps in Latin turn to Fs in German (and hence in many English words), which is how paternal pisces became fatherly fishes.

  It’s easy to see how this happens when you consider how it still goes on today. In the East End of London, people don’t pronounce their Hs and haven’t done for at least a hundred years. The house of a hundred hounds in Hackney would be pronounced the ’ouse of an ’undred ’ounds in ’Acne. Nor do East Enders pronounce the G at the end of participles, so instead of humming and hawing, a Londoner would find himself ’ummin’ and ’awin’.

  The important thing is that people do this consistently. Nobody listens to ’ip hop, or even hip ’op. You either pronounce your Hs or you don’t. Once one H has gone, they all disappear.

  Of course, East London English is still English, for now. But if somebody built a big wall around the East End and didn’t let anyone in or out for a few hundred years, the captives would probably make more and more changes until their language became utterly incomprehensible to the rest of the English-speaking world.

  Can that still happen?

  Nobody is quite sure how transport and communication will affect the splitting of languages. On the face of it, you’d expect accents to stop developing as everybody adjusted to the tyranny of television, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. In the US, for example, there’s a thing called the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, whereby people in Detroit and Buffalo have started pronouncing block as black and cot as cat. That, in turn, has pushed the A sound, so that cat is pronounced as cee-at: so folks in Detroit would call the famous children’s book The Cee-at in the Hee-at.

  And accent changes are unpredictable. In Jamaica they don’t drop their Hs, they pick them up. A Jamaican with a strong accent will hadd han haitch honto hany word that begins with a vowel. In New Zealand E has become I, so they have six. And though in Britain a medal is made of metal, in America a medal is usually made of substance that’s pronounced medal.

  These laws are not absolutely consistent; but they’re an awful lot better than you might expect. Also, words change their meaning and get shortened so you can’t just take an English word, apply some transformations to it, and come out with perfect Italian. But all the European languages are closely enough related that for the basic words – like father, eyes, heart – there’s probably a recognisable cousin.

  This is particularly amazing when you consider how Europe has been overrun again and again by hordes of barbarians speaking barbarian languages like Frankish.

  Frankly, My Dear Frankfurter

  Once upon a terribly long time ago, there was a tribe called the Franks. They invaded Gaul and Gaul became Franc[k]e.

  They oppressed the native Gauls horribly, forcing them to eat garlic and listen to Johnny Hallyday records. Only the Franks themselves were free. Thus they were enfranchised. They were able to speak freely, or frankly, and everybody else was disenfranchised and not able to approve things just by franking them.

  How did the Franks get to France? Well, on the way they had to cross the River Main. This was easily done: they found a ford by which to ford it. The place became known as Frank-ford on the Main, or Frankfurt am Main.

  Frankfurt is now best known as a financial centre, but also gave its name to a kind of low-rent sausage called a frankfurter. By the same token, a hamburger comes from Hamburg and involves no ham (or in the case of many modern hamburgers, no detectable meat at all). Also, a berliner is a kind of doughnut from Berlin, which made JFK’s famous remark – ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ – rather amusing to German audiences.

  Back in ancient France the big export used to be incense, which therefore became known as frankincense, and at least one of the conquering Franks managed to cross the Atlantic still bearing his name of ‘Son of the south freeborn landowner’, which translates to Benjamin Franklin.

  You may notice a pattern here. Naturally, the Franks named good things like frankincense and speaking frankly after themselves. It’s an absolute truth of linguistics that bad things are foreign.

  Beastly Foreigners

  The history of English prejudice is engraved in the English language.

  These days the Dutch are considered inoffensive, charming even; but it hasn’t always been so. The Dutch used to be a major naval and trading power just across the North Sea from Britain, and so Holland and Britain were natural and nautical enemies. Even when the two countries weren’t fighting outright battles, the English would subtly undermine their enemies by inventing rude phrases.

  Dutch courage is the courage found at the bottom of a bottle, and a Dutch feast is a meal where the host gets drunk before his guests. Dutch comfort is no comfort at all. A Dutch wife is simply a large pillow (or in gay slang something far more ingenious). A Dutch reckoning is a fraudulent price that is raised if you argue about it. A Dutch widow is a prostitute. A Dutch uncle is unpleasant and stern, and only tight-fisted diners insist on going Dutch. That’ll show them.

  In 1934 the Dutch government finally noticed all these phrases. They decided that it was too late to change the English language and instead made it a rule that their ambassadors in English-speaking countries only use the term The Netherlands.

  The Dutch probably invented their own equivalent phrases about the English, but nobody knows what they are, as the Dutch language is double Dutch to us. Anyway, the English were too busy thinking up nasty phrases about their other neighbours.

  Welsh rarebit used to be called Welsh rabbit, on the basis that when a Welshman promised you something nice to eat like rabbit, you were probably only going to get cheese on toast. The English also used to believe that the Welsh were crazy for cheese. Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811) records that:

  The Welch are said to be so remarkably fond of cheese, that in cases of difficulty their midwives apply a piece of toasted cheese to the janua vita [gates of life] to attract and entice the young Taffy, who on smelling it makes most vigorous efforts to come forth.

  By the same token, a Welsh carpet was a pattern painted, or stained, onto a brick floor; a Welsh diamond is a rock crystal; and a Welsh comb is your fingers.

  When they had finished abusing the Welsh, the English phrase-makers turned their fury on the Irish, who made Irish stew out of leftovers. In fact, it was decided that the Irish were so nonsensical that nonsense itself was call
ed Irish.

  Yet the great enemy of England has always been France. We believed the French to be dishonest lechers, which is why a French letter is a condom and French leave is truancy, although here the French have got their own back by calling the same thing filer à l’anglais.

  And when the English had got bored with just using the proper names of countries to insult them, they decided to think up nasty names for absolutely everybody.

  Pejoratives

  Here are some pejorative terms for the European nations and their origins.

  Frog Short for frog-eater (1798). Previously (1652) the pejorative for a Dutchman because Holland is so marshy.

  Kraut From the German for cabbage. First recorded in 1841, but popularised during the First World War.

  Hun meant destroyer of beauty in 1806, long before it became the pejorative for German. That’s because the Huns, like the Vandals, were a tribe who helped to bring down the Roman empire (the actual order was Vandal, Goth, Hun pushing each other from Germany through France to Spain and North Africa). Matthew Arnold called art-haters Philistines on the same basis of naming people you don’t like after an ancient tribe. It was Kaiser Wilhelm II who first applied Hun to Germans in 1900 when he urged the army he was sending to China to mimic the behaviour of their supposed Hunnish forebears and ‘Take no prisoners’, a phrase that’s usually attributed to him, although someone had doubtless said something like it before (‘I’ll be back’ is similarly attributed to the film Terminator). The word was taken up as a pejorative during the world wars as, though the Germans imagined their ancestors to be raffish and rugged, the British thought them beastly.

  Wop (1912) American term, from Neapolitan dialect guappo, meaning dandy or gigolo.

  Dago (1823) From Diego (obviously). Originally for either Spanish or Portuguese sailors.