Filibustero and Filibuster

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Alex Garcia from Los Angeles, California. How are you?

Hi, doing well, Alex. What can we do for you?

Well, I’m just interested in a word that I’ve heard over the years, the word filibuster.

And it’s very interesting because my grandmother used to use the word, I think, casually, but just, I think, referring to people that weren’t good or, I don’t know, like ruffians or something.

But I’ve always been interested in hearing the actual root of the word and where it comes from.

And it’s used in politics a lot, you know, just basically by people speaking about, you know, taking over the Congress floor and not letting other people speak.

So it’s always been a thing, you know, that I’ve been interested in.

Oh, that’s a good one. That’s a great choice. One, it has a known etymology, and two, that etymology goes all over the place. Lots of paths, footpaths for that.

I’m interested in your grandmother’s use of it as a ruffian.

Yeah, and you said your last name is Garcia. Do you speak Spanish or does she speak Spanish?

I might not sound like it, but yes, native Spanish speaker.

I grew up actually in Mexico City and then in San Diego, California, so I’ve been back and forth a lot between both countries.

But my grandmother used to be an author, and she used to write for Reader’s Digest in Mexico.

Oh, wow.

She would use these very, how would you say, very verbose words.

Maybe esoteric words.

Maybe words that the ordinary folk wouldn’t use, but the educated people might use.

Completely right.

And I think she took pride in having just a very extensive vocabulary.

And was she using this in Spanish, filibustero, or in English?

Yeah.

Yeah, that’s how she would say it, filibustero.

That’s outstanding.

All of this is relevant.

I know some listeners are going, hey, they’re going way down the garden path.

What else is new?

But this is relevant.

Let’s see if we can recap this word’s history as quickly as possible.

It originally comes from Dutch, a word meaning free booty.

And it’s pronounced freibouder, I believe.

Freibouder.

Freibouder.

But you can actually see kind of it vaguely resembles the English words free booty in its spelling.

And what it is, it’s related to piracy.

And basically people on the high seas are taking things that don’t belong to them.

But what happens is the word then is borrowed into other European languages.

And when it comes into English, it comes into English twice.

It comes in from French, filibustier, and then it comes again later from Spanish, filibustero.

And the second borrowing, the filibustero, is the one that we keep.

Fast forward quite a bit into the 1880s.

In the U.S. Congress, this habit of taking the floor in order to have a long oration and not cede the floor to anyone else becomes called a filibuster.

Because it is like you are a pirate seizing control of things on the high seas.

I mean, this is a time when there were a great number of filibusters, the individuals sailing around the Caribbean, sailing around the Atlantic, and just taking control of cities and towns.

And even Nicaragua, several times they tried to control it.

And these were adventurers in the kind of the pejorative sense.

These rascals and ruffians, as you said, these guys who were just come in with massive gunpower and their own private armies and try to control the land so that they could control the farms for the sugar cane and the palm and whatever else they were growing there.

This word then became a little more generalized.

So a filibuster could just be a scalawag or, like you said, a punk, just somebody who’s up to no good.

And this is the word that your grandmother was using in Spanish.

It’s far less common.

It has always been far less common in English, but it has existed.

These days, most of us only know filibuster when somebody takes the floor of Congress and won’t give up.

In a political context.

Yeah, political context.

They won’t give control over to somebody else.

How cool is that?

That’s very cool.

And actually, it’s very surprising because it just kind of didn’t make sense to me when it came to the long orations that take place in Congress.

It just didn’t make sense.

And now I guess it does.

Yeah.

It really does.

It’s about the seizing of things that don’t belong to you, basically.

Right, right, which happens all the time, every day.

But, I mean, nobody would think about using filibuster as the way to describe it.

Exactly.

Very interesting.

Thanks, Alex. We really appreciate your call.

Thank you both. It’s been very interesting, and I really enjoyed the show.

Thank you very much.

Thank you so much.

Take care.

Take care.

Bye-bye, Alex.

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