Original Use of Cummerbunds

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Hamida from San Antonio, Texas.

Hamida?

Yes.

Nice to meet you. What can we do for you?

I wanted to know where the word kamaraband originated from.

I have a theory because it sounds like a word in my language that I speak, Urdu, from India.

And it sounds like two words put together from that language.

So, like the word kummer means waist, and the word bund means to tie or to cloak.

Huh. And when you talk about kummer bund, you’re talking about the thing that men wear around the waist with a dinner jacket or tuxedo or something.

Mm—

Yeah, and that’s exactly right. It does come from what is now Pakistan and India, from the Urdu and Hindi languages.

And we got it into English from the British experience in the subcontinent.

So you are exactly right, Hamida.

That is exactly where it comes from.

Your instincts are good.

And the story of how it became a part of formal attire is interesting and worth hearing, if you’ve got a second.

Do you want to hear this?

Yeah.

In the late 1800s, there was a fellow by the name of Julius Jeffries, and he was a doctor.

And I’m getting this information from a book by Bernard Cohn called Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge.

So Dr. Jeffries had this theory that the British, the Europeans who were in the subcontinent should wear flannel and that it would protect them from diseases like cholera.

And he suggested that even in the heat, their entire outfit should be made out of flannel.

And he himself wore a flannel suit for seven years and never caught anything as far as he ever reported to anybody.

And so he passed this on to the powers that be, which then kind of made it a policy to wear flannel.

And now what happened is over the years it got reduced.

So maybe you were only flannel pants or a flannel suit, or maybe you just wore a flannel sash around your midsection.

So by the 1880s, nothing was left of this flannel except the cummerbund.

So you would just wear your uniform, and as part of that, you would have this formal piece of flannel around your midsection that was supposed to ward off the diseases of that part of the world.

And they called it the cholera belt.

That was their name for it.

Is that right?

Because it was supposed to stop cholera.

And so before you know it, this got kind of added to the formal uniform of soldiers.

And because it was part of the formal uniform, would be adopted into other kinds of formal outerwear.

And then past many decades, and here we are in the United States, if you’re 17 going to your senior prom,

You’re probably wearing this belt around your midsection because of what happened with the British in India that long ago.

Wow, I did hear about the collar belt. I didn’t know that this was connected to that. That’s really interesting.

What’s really interesting is that they started to think about it almost magically and stopped thinking about it as a barrier that would stop illnesses from touching the skin and just kind of started treating the flannel as if it had magical powers.

Just the presence of the flannel would ward off evil or ward off disease.

And so it was almost a token.

It’s kind of like, you ever seen like a six-year-old wash his hands?

He just kind of gets them wet and doesn’t really wash them.

It’s kind of like that.

It doesn’t actually do any job anymore, but you still feel like, well, I’ve gone through the motions.

Here it is.

Yes, that’s my son. You’re talking about my son.

Yes, mine too. I was thinking of my own son, but yes.

So anyway, so that’s how Kamar Bunn, it does come from that part of the world, Hindi and Udu,

And that’s how it ended up in the attire of Americans who go to formal gatherings.

Wow, that is so crazy. You guys are awesome. I love your show.

Thank you very much. We’re glad to hear from you, Hamida.

If anything else occurs to you, because we don’t know anything about Udu, let us know.

We’d be glad to hear from you again, all right?

Thank you. You guys have a great day.

Cheers. Take care now.

Bye-bye.

We’d love to hear your stories about language.

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