baja mensa club

Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Spanish Word of the Day: Pollo

Spanish pollo = chicken
"I am pleased as Punch to call you what you are, sir, a poltroon!"

Latin pullus, a hen or small animal, became Spanish pollo. Several interesting English words also appear. A Poltroon, for example, is a "thorough coward." Punch, from the English Punch & Judy puppet show, is no coward. Not he. Would that he were. His story is particularly interesting, starting with the Italian word pulcina.

Italian pulcina yielded Neapolitan Pulcinella, a slow-witted, large-nosed, hen-like male servant who was a stock character in the Commedia dell'arte. He later became popular in Italian and French puppet shows. The English took him in and changed his name to Punchinello, then shortened that to Punch in naming the quarrelsome husband in the Punch and Judy puppet shows. Punch was not a nice man. He beat his wife, the dirty dog (he being the dirty dog, not his wife; she would have been the dirty bitch). His unholy glee while doing such things gave us the expression, 'Pleased as Punch.'

"The stereotypical view of Punch casts him as a deformed, child-murdering, wife-beating psychopath who commits appalling acts of violence and cruelty upon all those around him and escapes scot-free, - and is thus greatly enjoyed by small children." (Unknown)

Saturday, September 1, 2007

Spanish word of the day: bigote

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.

Friday, May 4, 2007

Happy Cinco de Mayo

Hoist a cerveza, amigos!

First came the New England Pilgrims and their Virginia cousins. Then came the Revolutionary War, followed by the Louisiana Purchase. The Monroe Doctrine restrained European competition in our hemisphere and the concept of Manifest Destiny gave moral authority to our westward push. The pesky Texians colonized the Mexican territory of Tejas, conquered it, then, in 1845, joined it to the United States. That led to war in 1846 ("From the Halls of Montezuma," etc.). We won, but, to tell the truth, it wasn't all that easy. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 gave us the rest of what is now the American Southwest, just in time for the California Gold Rush of 1849. Whew! That was close!

Meanwhile, south of the (new) border, Mexico had borrowed heavily from France, England and Spain to finance the war. Payments fell behind and that irked the European lenders. Along came our Civil War and we were temporarily unable to enforce the Monroe Doctrine. The Europeans seized the opportunity to invade Mexico and demand payment. Mexico reached separate agreements with the English and Spanish, who turned around and went home. But the rascally French had all along intended to conquer Mexico and use it as a platform to enrich themselves and support the Confederacy, thereby weakening the U.S. On May 5 (cinco de mayo), 1862, French forces met Mexican forces at Puebla. The Mexicans prevailed. Decisively. The battle was won, but not the war. Not until the American Civil War ended did the U.S. turn its attention southward again. The French were finally forced out in 1867. ¡Salud!