Stories That Words Tell Us

by Elizabeth O'Neill

The word bamboozle is still almost slang, though perhaps more common than it was two hundred years ago, when Swift attacked it. Even now we do not know where it came from. There was a slang word used at the time but now forgotten—bam, which meant a trick or practical joke; and some scholars have thought that bamboozle (which, of course, means "to deceive") came from this. On the other hand, it may have been the other way about, and that the shorter word came from the longer. The word bamboozle shows us how hard it is for meaningless slang to become good English even after a struggle of two hundred years.

We have seen how many slang words in English have become good English, so that people use with propriety expressions that would have seemed improper or vulgar fifty or ten or even five years ago. Other interesting words are some which are perfectly good English as now used, but which have been borrowed from other languages, and in those languages are or were mere slang. The word bizarre, which we borrowed from the French, and which means "curious," in a fantastic or half-savage way, is a perfectly dignified word in English; but it must have been a slang word at one time in French. It meant long ago in French "soldierly," and literally "bearded"—that is, if it came from the Spanish word bizarra, "beard."

Another word which we use in English has a much less dignified use in French. We can speak of the calibre of a person, meaning the quality of his character or intellect; but in French the word calibre is only in ordinary speech applied to things. To speak of a "person of a certain calibre" in French is very bad slang indeed.

Again, the word fiasco, which we borrowed from the Italian, and which means the complete failure of something from which we had hoped much, was at first slang in Italian. It was applied especially to the failure of a play in a theatre. To break down was far fiasco, which literally means "make a bottle." The phrase does not seem to have any very clear meaning, but at any rate it is far removed from the dignified word fiasco as used in English.

The word sack as used in describing the sack of a town in war is a picturesque and even poetic word; but as it comes from the French sac, meaning "pack" or "plunder," it is really a kind of slang.

On the other hand, words which belong to quite good and ordinary speech in their own languages often become slang when adopted into another. A slang word much used in America and sometimes in England (for American expressions are constantly finding their way into the English language) is vamoose, which means "depart." Vamoose comes from a quite ordinary Mexican word, vamos, which is Spanish for "let us go."

It is very interesting to find that many of our most respectable words borrowed from Latin have a slang origin. Sometimes these words were slang in Latin itself; sometimes they were used as slang only after they passed into English. The French word tête, which means "head," comes from the Latin testa, "a pot." (We have seen that this is the word from which we get our word test.) Some Romans, instead of using caput, the real Latin word for "head," would sometimes in slang fashion speak of some one's testa, or "pot," and from this slang word the French got their regular word for head.

The word insult comes from the Latin insultarc, which meant at first "to spring or leap at," and afterwards came to have the same meaning as it has with us. The persons who first used this expression in the second sense were really using slang, picturing a person who said something unpleasant to them as "jumping at them."

We have the same kind of slang in the expression "to jump down one's throat," when we mean "to complain violently of some one's behaviour." The word effrontery, which comes to us from the French effronterie, is really the same expression as the vulgar terms face and cheek, meaning "impudence." For the word comes from the Latin frons, "the forehead."

An example of a word which was quite good English, and then came to be used as slang in a special sense, and then in this same special sense became good English again, is grit. The word used to mean in English merely "sand" or "gravel," and it came to mean especially the texture or grain of stones used for grinding. Then in American slang it came to be used to mean all that we mean now when we say a person has "grit"—namely, courage, and strength, and firmness. This use of the word seemed so good that it rapidly became good English; but the American slang-makers soon found another word to replace it, and now talk of people having "sand," which is not by any means so expressive, and will probably never pass out of the realm of slang.