A bunch of English words actually take from the names of old places: peach comes from Persia, bungalow refers to a house “of the Bengal type,” and laconic refers to the region of Sparta famous as a place where people valued speech that was brief and to the point. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Words Derived from Old Places”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, this is Sigrun Newell.
Hi, Sigrun. How are you?
Hi, Sigrun.
I’m good, thank you. Hello, Martha.
Where are you calling from?
I’m calling from Albany, New York.
Well, welcome to the show. How can we help?
Well, recently I read an article in Archaeology Magazine that discusses the recovery of a 2,000-year-old shipwreck off the coast of Sri Lanka. It seems as though ever since then that island nation has been an important way station for shipping between India and China. People always went by Sri Lanka in order to refill their ships and pick up products to sell and so forth. It’s been so important that there’s more than half a dozen different names for the place. And it turns out that our word serendipity comes from the Arabic name for the island, which was serendip. And so my question is, what other common words have ancient geographical places hidden in them?
Yeah, serendipity is one of those classic toponyms, right?
Yeah, yeah. It comes from a Persian fairy tale, as I recall.
Right, although the meaning kind of transformed over time. But yeah, so we use serendipity to mean something happens fortuitously. We weren’t expecting it, but there it is when we need it.
Yeah. So interesting. So you’re talking about ancient places buried in modern English words.
Right.
Do you have any in mind, Sigrun?
Not really. I wondered about Shangri-La, which we use now is more than just the place of Shangri-La, the geographical place. We use more to mean a place of beauty and wonderful.
That’s true. We talk about Eden the same way, Garden of Eden the same way.
Yeah. I think Shangri-La is a little bit more recent, isn’t it?
We can go into the language to words that are opaque.
Sure.
Their etymology is invisible to you when you use them or read them.
Sure.
Well, I can think of a couple off the top of my head, certainly Olympics, you know, from Mount Olympus. And I think of Laconic, which has to do with the area around Sparta where there were people who lived who were very short and brief in their speech. So Laconic would be one. There’s the word peach, as in the fruit, ultimately comes from a word meaning Persia. And bungalow comes from a word meaning of Bengal. So that’s a direct borrowing from Hindi into English.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, and then there’s Sardonic.
Oh, nice.
Yeah, that has to do with in Sardinia, there was supposedly a weed. I remember this from studying ancient Greek. There was a weed that people would eat, like a plant, and it would cause them to smile. It just created this rictus in their face. Their face would tense up, and it would look like they had this real weird smile.
Well, there’s another one from Sardinia as well, sardines.
Oh, hello.
Yeah, so there’s two from that place.
Okay, food words, currants.
Oh, currants, nice.
Like currants, like raisin-type currants are from Corinth. I mean, we can go all day on this secret. It’s this port city where they, yeah.
Oh, here’s a food word for it. Java. We call it coffee Java sometimes. It’s from the Indonesian island of Java.
Yeah, lots of foods. You’re plugging into this larger theme, which is really a key part of this show, which is like it seems so modern and current to speak English. And yet every time we open our mouths or start to work on a keyboard and put words to a page, we are expressing history.
Oh, I love that.
It just pours out of us. We don’t even know it half the time, or most of the time. We have no idea that this word and that word, 1,000 years, 10,000 years, 500 years.
Yes.
Well said, Grant. History is flying out of your mouth every day.
So, Sigrun, you got us off on a roll here. I hope this call was serendipitous, right?
That’s true.
A fine serendipitous call.
Well, thanks a lot for calling, Sigrun. And thanks for all the ways you have improved my vocabulary and my world.
Oh, thank you so much.
Thanks for listening. That means a lot.
Take care now.
Goodbye.
Bye-bye.
Bye, Sigrun.
This is a show about what we say and how we say it. Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or put it in an email to words@waywordradio.org.
