Minicast Bonus: Picketwire

You’re listening to an A Way with Words minicast.

And today, we’re diving into a fascinating question from Gary Heath. He’s an emeritus professor at Mount St. Clair College in Clinton, Iowa. And Gary writes, a French teacher at Dartmouth College told me about Purgatoire, Kansas becoming Picket Wire, Kansas due to Yankee immigrants replacing French settlers. I can find no documentation or reference to this. Can you help?

Oh, yeah, we can help. That’s on the right track, but it’s not quite right. The shift from Purgatoire to Picket Wire is for a river and its canyon land in southeastern Colorado, not Kansas. It is a great example, though, of folk etymology and how it shapes what we say.

So how does Purgatoire become Picket Wire phonetically, Grant? I mean, the first word is French for purgatory, but Picket Wire?

Well, this name has undergone a couple transformations. First, it was Spanish, Rio de las Ánimas Perdidas en Purgatorio, meaning the River of the Lost Souls in Purgatory. And then the French settlers took that Spanish and shortened it to just Purgatoire. English speakers heard something like Purgatoire and then mapped it to the familiar words picket and wire. In folk etymology like this, a change is made to fit current knowledge. So we reshape a word or a name into a form that seems to make sense.

So maybe these folks were thinking of fences and horse pickets? Right. Pickets being those stakes you drive in the ground to tether horses to. This folk transformation happens through hearing and reading something unfamiliar. We fit the unfamiliar words to the rules of our own language, or we recast unfamiliar sounds into familiar words.

So do people still use the name Picket Wire for the river? Yep. Percurtois is the official name on maps, but Picket Wire is a living local pronunciation that folks still use. And the Spanish name of the river also gave Las Arimas County and a couple of nearby towns their names.

Well, we do see a lot of other words and place names where this has happened. Yeah. There’s a linguistic term, in fact, that is itself a folk etymology, Hobson-Jobson. It refers to the shaping of foreign words into more familiar forms, like we explained. And it’s named after an Anglophone version of an Arabic mourning cry for Hassan and Hussein, the grandsons of the Prophet Muhammad. Jobson, Jobson was what English speakers thought they heard.

Yeah, and I bet you’re going to tell me that there are lots of others that are the result of folk etymology. Martha, you know there are. Just sticking to French, which is a language I know well, there’s smack over Arkansas, which may come from the French chemin couvert, meaning covered path.

Yeah, right? About this one, low freight Arkansas. It may come from the French low fret, low froide, meaning freezing or cold water. And Lemon Fair River in Vermont is said to come from Le Mont Vert, meaning Green Hill.

Oh, there are a lot of green hills in Vermont. Indeed. Well, Grant, is there something about French that makes this more common? Or does this have to do with, I don’t know, English speakers?

Nope. It can happen any time any people speaking any language encounter a place name from another language. Key West, for example, is an Anglophone transformation of the Spanish gallo hueso, meaning bone key.

Well, at least one word was correct. Indeed. In any case, Gary, if you ever find yourself near La Junta, Colorado, that’s the Anglophone version of the Spanish La Junta, take a drive through the Pico Air Canyonlands. You’ll find dinosaur tracks and cowboy history and a name that tells a story.

And if you’ve got a favorite place name with a curious origin, we would love to hear about it. So drop us a line, words@waywordradio.org. Or call or text toll-free in the United States and Canada, 877-929-9673.

For A Way with Words, I’m Martha Barnette. And I’m Grant Barrett. Bye. Bye.