Chicanery

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there, this is April from Iowa City.

Hey, April, welcome.

Hey there, what’s up?

Well, I was listening to a show that you probably enjoy as well, This American Life.

Oh, yes.

And I heard the narrator of a story, and he was Mexican-American, but obviously a native English speaker.

He said a word that I would have pronounced and have always heard, chicanery, but he said it chicanery.

And that got me thinking, was he just being clever?

Was he just playing on words because it sounded a lot like the word Chicano?

You know, Mexican-American?

So that just made me wonder, are those words related in any way?

Because I sure never would have connected them.

Okay, this is good.

We’ve got layers of questions here.

So a Mexican-American said chicanery instead of chicanery.

He did not pronounce it correctly.

It is supposed to be chicanery.

There’s one other variant pronunciation, which is chicanery or shicanery.

With a sh?

Yeah, some dictionaries sanction that.

But chicanery is most often the North American pronunciation.

Whether or not he was influenced in his pronunciation by the existence and his knowledge of the word Chicano, I don’t know.

But there’s no etymological or historical connection between the words at all.

None.

It pops up into French, and in the 1400s is the verb chicane, something like that.

And it has to do with willfully causing arguments or willfully disturbing the peace or willfully misdirecting people and creating a hard time for them for no good reason.

Yeah, trickery.

Trickery, yeah.

Right. And that’s how it was used in the context of the story.

Yeah, yeah. It’s held its meaning very firmly, as a matter of fact.

Chicano, I’m not sure of the origins of the word Chicano, but it rises first in the 50s and 60s as part of, what should we call it, the identity movement of Mexican Americans in the West and the Southwest of the United States.

And it really takes on a strong importance then.

The importance of the word Chicano has faded quite a bit.

For example, you won’t find it being used that often anymore in university Latin studies programs.

But, I mean, in the name of the program or the endowed fellowships or that sort of thing.

One interesting thing about this, there’s a version of this word, April, that you might not know that I really love.

And it’s a name for a thing that you didn’t know had a name.

Do you know when you are, let’s say, driving through a parking lot that’s under construction or a highway that’s under construction,

And they put these giant concrete barriers in the road, and they kind of like detour you maybe onto the side of the road so you can go around the construction equipment?

You know those big concrete barriers?

Those are called chicanes.

That’s so great.

Yeah, because they are literally detouring you and routing you around something.

They are diverging you or diverting you from your original destination.

From the mischief of road construction.

Yeah, exactly.

Cool.

Well, it’s interesting.

I guess I was maybe hoping there was some kind of Latin commonality, but you don’t always get what you want.

No, we don’t.

But still, we’ve got a little bit of French in there and a little bit of this and a little bit of that.

Yeah, interesting stuff.

Thanks for calling, April.

Really appreciate it.

Well, you’re welcome.

Thank you for your help.

Best of luck.

Bye-bye.

All right, bye-bye.

Grant, we do know the origin of Chicano.

It’s a dialectal variant of Mexicano, which is, you know, Mexican.

Right, the Spanish word for Mexican. Very good.

Now we do know.

Yeah.

First it was just you, and now it’s the two of us and everybody.

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