Spanish bigote = mustache"By God, sir earl, you will either go or hang!"
"By God, sir king, I will neither go nor hang!"
Edward I (Longshanks) and the Earl of Norfolk on the refusal of the latter to fight the battles of the former on the continent.
One result of the Norman Conquest of England was the enthusiastic and constant Norman use of the Old English exclamation, Bi Got! The French condensed the two-word exclamation into bigot and used it as a term of contempt for the Normans. The Normans, unlike their Viking ancestors, didn't sport a lot of facial hair. But they did wear mustaches. Bigot slowly crept southward through what is now France until it arrived in Spain, where it was hispanicized to bigote and given the meaning of mustache. French bigot then fell into disuse.
But the word reappeared in France with a new meaning, "a person intolerant of beliefs and opinions that differ from his own." It's very likely that this new meaning was influenced by a type of Spanish gentleman called hombre de bigotes. An extraordinarily vigorous and serious man, he was the end product of hundreds of years of warfare against the most unwelcome Muslims and a man with zero tolerance for religious unorthodoxy in any form. Bigot returned to England with this new meaning.
As a point of interest, the Earl of Norfolk neither went nor hung. His name was Roger Bigod and his surname is an example of an ancestor's nickname becoming a respectable family name. Edward Longshanks ("Hammer of the Scots") was the villainous English king played by Patrick McGoohan in the movie Braveheart. Copyright © 2007 - Jerry Schnell - All rights reserved
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