More critter etymologies
Aardvark came to English in 1833 from Afrikaans (a branch of Dutch). It’s a
compound Dutch word meaning earth-pig
(aard
= earth & vark = pig). Big thanks to Paul Fahey for suggesting I look into aardvark.
And
thanks to Christine Ahern for asking about raccoon, which came to our language from
Algonquian in the 1600s, written raugroughcum in Captain John Smith’s
journals. It translates to he scratches
with the hands.
Another
English word that came from Algonquian is moose, written by various “first
inscribers” as muns, moos, mooz and moz.
The story is that an earlier form was moosu, meaning he strips off.
This referred to the animal’s habit of stripping bark from trees for its meals.
The
word penguin
first referred to the now-extinct great auk of Newfoundland. Apparently the
birds we now call penguins share some characteristics with the great auk. Sir
Francis Drake wrote this word into English in the 1570s. The one proposed source
is pooh-poohed by most etymologists, but for the sake of interest, I’ll state
it here. In Welsh, pen means head and gwyn
means white, and the long-gone
great auks of Newfoundland had a big white spot between their eyes.
The
word slug
came to English in 1704 to refer to a shell-less
land snail. It was taken from the word sluggard, which referred to a slow-moving & useless person.
Though the existence of slugs pre-dates the existence of sluggards
(or any people for that matter), we anthropocentric humans labeled those lazy people a good 500 years before
labeling the shell-less snail.
Toad came from who-knows-where about the time we started calling English
English. It had several forms including tadie, tadige &
toadie. Rest assured, hard-working etymologists are – as you read -
digging through old manuscripts to solve this centuries-old mystery.
Like
toad,
barracuda
remains a mystery. It arrived in English in 1607 probably through American
Spanish from some Caribbean language, but nobody knows but the barracudas,
& they’re not talking (it can’t be easy to enunciate through all those
teeth).
If
an Old English speaker were to have seen what we would today call a hamster,
s/he would have correctly referred to it as a German rat. By the
1600s, though, the German word hamster showed up in English,
eventually eclipsing the less attractive moniker. It is thought that the German
word hamster
may have come from a combining of the Russian word chomiak and the
Lithuanian word staras. Though my sick and twisted sensibilities wish chomiak
meant German and staras meant rat, my sensibilities are dead wrong.
Both words mean hamster.
So,
are any of you out there celebrating the holidays by wrapping up a German
rat for someone you love?