A sixth-grade teacher in San Antonio, Texas, is skeptical about a story that gringo derives from a song lyric. He’s right. The most likely source of this word is the Spanish word for “Greek,” griego, a term applied to foreigners much the same way that English speakers might say that an unintelligible language is Greek to me. The ancient Greeks, on the other hand, imitated the sound of foreigners with the word barbaroi, the source of our own word barbarian. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Origin of Gringo”
Hello, you have a way with the words.
Hi, this is Tom Sickman calling from San Antonio, Texas.
Hi, Tom.
Hi, Tom. What’s up?
Well, I’m going to tell you a little bit about the word that I have in the background.
I’m a world cultures teacher in San Antonio, Texas at a middle school.
I teach sixth grade.
In one of my classes here at my school, one of my students, and our population is predominantly Hispanic, on the west side of San Antonio.
We were discussing, and he came up with, he asked me a question, Mr. Sickman, what does the word gringo mean? And I said, well, I’ve heard it before, and I think I know what it means. What do you think it means? So we discussed her for a while and decided that it meant somebody who was an Anglo or somebody non-Hispanic. But later in a discussion with a colleague about the word, she mentioned that she remembered from a college course that it had a very interesting origin. And that’s what I was calling about, where the word came from.
Yeah, that’s my understanding of it in Spanish, that it means a foreigner, and usually a foreigner who’s English-speaking, but not necessarily. I’m curious about the origin story that this person had, though. Do you remember it? The story that she remembered from her college course was that during the colonization of Texas by the American settlers and the War for Texas Independence, there was an incident where a group of Texicans or Americans traveled to Mexico or tried to invade someplace and they were captured.
They were marched to Mexico City for trial.
Somewhere on the way, the word gringo came up as part of a song. And the captors from Mexico heard this song and there was something about the lyrics of the song that started the word gringo.
Tom, I hope I’m hearing skepticism in your voice.
I think I am.
Because there is a story about the song Green Grow the Lilacs, and that being misunderstood, but that’s completely false. It doesn’t come from a song. There’s like four or five versions of the song story, and none of them are accurate.
Yeah, for one thing, the word gringo itself predates the song, so that way you know that that’s not the real story.
The origin of gringo is somewhat in dispute, but I think our best guess, and I’m pretty well persuaded by it, is that it comes from the Spanish word griego, which means Greek. And sort of in the same way that we might say it’s Greek to me, somebody’s language is unintelligible to me, it’s Greek to me. It was thought to have been used that way to describe a foreigner. They sound like somebody from another country.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It’s interesting, too, in ancient Greece, the word barabaros had the same sense of somebody who’s just speaking gibberish, barabarabara, and we get barbarian from that word.
So the Griego was used to describe a variety of non-Spanish-speaking Europeans back in the 1700s, right, long before this song came about.
Yeah.
Well, very interesting.
Well, I’m so, so delighted to have got that straightened out because I couldn’t really find any place that confirmed it. And so it’s an interesting story, but not true.
So, Tom, now you can take the story back to your students.
Yeah, thank you for allowing me on your show.
Our pleasure.
Thank you, Tom.
Good luck with the kids.
Thanks. Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Email words@waywordradio.org and hit us up on Twitter @wayword.
Thank you.
