Buccaneer

Buccaneer - a pirate

Do you barbecue? If the answer's a yay vs.a nay, then you may very well count yourself in the same league as swashbuckling Capt. Jack Sparrow. 'Coz that's where the word's origin lies.

Buccaneer originates in French as "boucanier" which referred to a person on the Caribbean islands who hunted wild boars etc. and cured/smoked the meat over a barbecue frame called a "boucan" in French. The word "boucan" itself came from a Tupi word meaning "a rack or rack-like platform." So there! If you barbecue, you are no less than Johnny Depp himself!!!!! :)

Source: Wikipedia/Google Images

Deja vu

Guest Post by Radha

'Déjà vu' is a french term that literally means "already seen" and has several variations, including 'déjà vécu', already experienced; 'déjà senti', already thought; and 'déjà visité', already visited. French scientist Emile Boirac, one of the first to study this strange phenomenon, gave the subject its name in 1876.

Trivia: Research shows that almost 70% of people experience 'deja vu' at least once before the age of 25 and that it is usually triggered not by big events but by life's mundane details (like the pattern of the dishes stacked in the kitchen or the window-display in a shop).

My favourite theory explaining 'deja vu' is from the movie "The Matrix" :)

NEO: A black cat went past us and then I saw another that looked just like it.

TRINITY: How much like it? Was it the same cat?

NEO: It might have been. I'm not sure. What is it?

TRINITY: A deja vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.

Croissant

Croissant - (Pronounced as kwah-SAHN) : A rich, flaky pastry made in the form of a crescent.

I had to share this: the origin of this one had the gastronome and history-buff in moi stoked!!! There are several legends that go with the origin of the pastry but the one that rules supreme is :

In the latter half of the seventeenth century (around 1680's) , an army of Turks besieged the city of Vienna. When Turks tried to get into the city by tunneling under the walls, bakers overheard the noise and sounded the alarm that subsequently led to the Turkish defeat. Austrians celebrated the event by honoring the bakers by creating the pastry for the occasion: "Croissant" or French for Crescent to symbolize their victory over the Turks whose flag bore a crescent moon.It is first recorded in English in 1899.

The question arises why a French word when it was Austrians who were victorious. There are various theories for this one too. The most prominent ones :

1. It was called a kipfel, the German word for crescent. The pastry wouldn't become a croissant until the Austrian Princess Marie Antoinette married the King of France (1770).

2. At the time, French Language was en vogue within aristocratic circles due to the prominence of the French King Louis XIV.

Note : There are disputes over whether the place attacked was Vienna in 1683 or Budapest in 1686.

Sources : http://www.answers.com, http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodbreads.html
Pic : Modern day Turkish Flag and Croissant, sourced from Google.

Portmanteau

Portmanteau - (Pronounced as Port-man-tow) noun

What do u think is common between words like: motel, chortle, muppet, brunch, smog, spork, moped, cyborg, blog or the silliest of them all Brangelina? It's a cinch really, and am sure u all know what I'm arriving at! :)

They are all portmonteau words or simply put portmanteaux/portmanteaus (plural of portmonteau) : words that are formed by combining both sounds and meanings from two or more words.

Portmonteau according to Chambers entered in English from Middle French around 1584 and was originally used to mean a travelling bag, typically with two compartments (porte- from porter- to carry, manteau- from Old French mantel- cloak).

The term portmanteau as a description of word combinations was devised by English writer and mathematician Lewis Carroll (real name Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832-98). Carroll introduced the portmanteau word-combination term in the book 'Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There' (the sequel to 'Alice's Adventures In Wonderland'), which first appeared in 1871. In the book, the character Humpty Dumpty uses the word portmanteau (as a descriptive noun) to describe to Alice how the new word 'slithy' is formed from two separate words and meanings, lithe and slimy: "...You see it's like a portmanteau - there are two meanings packed up into one word..."

"Portmanteau" is rarely used to refer to a suitcase in English any more, since that type of a suitcase has fallen into disuse.

This post takes me back to my post on Denial ain't just a river in Egypt where I talked about how some of the seminal authors whose works we have read and loved before, have enriched our vocabularies. This seems to be an interesting trip I have embarked on and I'm looking forward to every pit-stop. :)

Sources: http://dictionary.reference.com/ , www.wikipedia.org


Update (22/04/07): by 666

Check out this extensive list on portmanteaus

Silhouette

silhouette - \sil'-you-et\ noun

1: A drawing consisting of the outline of something, especially a human profile, filled in with a solid color.
2: An outline that appears dark against a light background, outline

If you have seen the recently released movie "The Namesake" by Mira Nair, you'll remember the character, Ashoke Ganguli played by Irfan Khan repeating one of his grandfather's favorite quote, ".....that's what books are for, you can see the world without moving an inch". English as a language is a well-toured one. As, Allan Metcalf, in his book, "The world in so many words", writes "If you speak English, you know at least a bit of a hundred languages. Or more. It's true. You are a savant in French, a genius in Latin, a philosopher in Greek. If you made it through kindergarten, you have mastered a bit of German. If you have a yen to be a tycoon......you are speaking Chinese and Japanese. If you trek to paradise, you are going through Afrikaans and Persian."

That brings me to the word Silhouette...For someone who pursues photography in her spare time, this word holds a special meaning for moi. And you don't need a MOI to tell you that it migrated into English from French. You know it has French origins by the mere sound of it :)

What I found fascinating though was that it was coined after the name of a French gentleman (err....Monsieur) Étienne de Silhouette (1709–1767) who was a controller general of finances in France in the mid-eighteenth century. He was extremely niggardly with the state money as well as his own that for a time "a la Silhouette" came to mean "on the cheap". His parsimony was greeted with ridicule. Outline drawings were given his name (trust Frenchmen with an imagination like that!!!!!). He was forced out of office in less than a year, but an outline is still, in French and in English, a silhouette. :)

Sources: The Merriam-Webster Book of Word Histories
http://www.answers.com/

Pic: Moi

Update (05/04/07): by 666

I am not entirely certain but these are the caricatures which Moi is referring to. Further research proved fascinating and I hope to do a follow-up post on 'Silhouette' .. every dark cloud has a silver lining !