Friday, February 4: Bandersnatches
HATCHET JOB
by Steven Steinbock
Last week I wrote ad nauseum about unoriginal television series. The crazy thing is that I set out to write a column about words – and my spiel about television was meant to be an introduction.
I got curious about Corned Beef. When you look at it, there are mustard seeds, peppers, and herbs. But I’ve never seen any corn on the meat. What gives?
Turns out that there’s more to corn than meets the eye. Several month back I discussed pomegranates. The gran in “pomegranate” and the corn in “corned beef” come from a common seed, a Proto-Indo-European word meaning – seed, or grain. We – particularly the North Americans among us – have come to use the word “corn” to specifically refer to maize. The narrowing of a definition happens a lot in language. Cattle, for instance, originally meant “property” and only later did it come to refer specifically to “livestock” and, by the 1550s, narrowed further to mean “cows.” While we’re on the subject of corned beef, cow has gone in two directions, with both a narrowing and a generalized meaning. It once referred to all bovines, male and female. Today the meaning has narrowed to female bovines, and widened (albeit mostly colloquially) to refer to any large female mammal (elephants, whales, and at times, rudely, humans). Beef, incidentally, at one time referred to a living bovine, while today it only applies to the animals after the butcher has done his work. But I digress.
The corn in corned beef refers to the grains of salt used to preserve the meat. One story (that I can’t verify because I wasn’t alive yet) is that corned beef gained its popularity because it could be prepared before Catholic Lent, and eaten after the end of Lent. But if that’s true, then where did the Easter Ham come from? I find the story kinda corny.
That brings us to hash. The modern word has two very different meanings because it comes it comes from two very different and linguistically unrelated origins: hache and hashish. We’ll put them in opposite corners of the boxing ring and let them hash it out.
In this corner, hash comes from the French word for ax: hache. (Hence the hatchet in the title of this column). Hash is anything that’s been chopped up. So, for those of you of the carnivorous persuasion, after eating corned beef and baked potatoes on Saturday night, you can take your hatchet to the leftovers and fry them up for Sunday breakfast.
And in that corner, hash is the shortened form of the Arabic word “hashish,” which comes from an Arabic root meaning “dried up.” (Hashish is also the source of the word Assassin, meaning “hash-eater” and refers to doped-up killers; the relevance of this to the current situation on the Egyptian street we won’t even go into). Like cow, the word hash may have once been used more broadly to include any dried up leaves, and cannabis leaves in particular, and later narrowed to mean the concentrated resin of the cannabis flower. Put that in your pipe and smoke it for breakfast.
Someone said hash has no recipe, you accumulate it.
Wonderful seriously disturbed puns, Steve.
Dear Steve:
Okay, Mr. Smartiepants explain why we use “cow” to mean “intimidate”.
SC
I’ve got this one, Steve.
To cow in the sense of “to intimidate” comes from the Old Norse kúga, meaning “to depress with fear,” hence its English sense of “to dispirit, overawe, intimidate.”
This is probably not related to cower, “to stand or squat in a bent position; to bend with the knees and back; to crouch, esp. for shelter, from danger, or in timidity,” which is also likely from the Old Norse, and is a cognate with a whole variety of modern Nordic words meaning to squat (Swedish kura and Danish kure) or to sleep or doze (Icelandic kúra). Neither is it related to coward, which comes to us from the Old French coart, meaning “tail”.
A cow in the sense of a female of the bovine persuasion comes from the Old English cú, meaning, um, cow in the sense of a female of the bovine persuasion. It’s a very common Teutonic or Indo-germanic word.
And that’s no bull.
Thanks, James.
Here’s another “cow” term: Kowtow, the verb meaning to show deference, act obsequiously, or bootlick, comes from a third and totally different source, BTW. It’s Chinese, apparently, and means to knock oneself in the head or touch forehead to the ground.
It would be a strange coincidence if cower, coward, and the verb to cow all come from different roots.
James, I think it was you who pointed out that the prefix “homo” has two completely different sources and correspondingly different meanings. The homo in homo-sexual, for instance, is from the Greek for “same,” while the homo in homo sapiens comes from the Latin for “man” (like the modern French, homme).
Is there a word for two identical words with different etymologies?
homonym—
I’ve never had hash, now I don’t want hash, and cows have always intimidated me if they are still on the hoof and sometimes in my plate.
I enjoyed your article.
Yup, cows and hash don’t mix. If they start chewing on that stuff, you’ll have them jumpin’ over the moon.
Homonyms are either words that have more than one meaning, e.g., to brain someone with a baseball bat may injure his brain, or words that sound the same, like “they’re”, “their”, and “there”.
The word Steve is looking for is homograph, which refers to words that are spelled and pronounced the same but have different meanings and etymologies; e.g. hash above, or the relationship between a vampire bat and the aforementioned baseball bat.
There are also heteronyms, which are words that are spelled the same but have different stresses and meanings, e.g., a perfect storm and to perfect one’s argument.
I prefer my homonyms with grits.
Melodie, you are so ignorant. I don’t know why I love you so much.
Homonyms are grits.
Homonyms are grits.
Only with gravy, James.
This forces me to quote Mother Goose:
And that’s a real cock and bull story.
Thanks! But where, I wonder, does the bit about “hashing something out” come from?
Likewise from the French hache, but more particularly from its verb form, hacher, to cut meat into small pieces for cooking.
Metaphorically then, to hash something out is to resolve a conflict point by point, i.e., by dealing with its constituent parts instead of the whole, you are chopping it up in order to cook all of it.
In computing, “to hash” is to obtain a number from a string of characters by applying an algorithm to it. I wrote a hash table as part of the lexical analysis function for the compiler I wrote when I took my Certificate in Computer Science at UCLA back in the early 90s.
Steve:
What is the orogin of the use of “beef” as in ” What’s yer beef wit’ me, fella?”
SC
Chapman traces beef to mean a complaint to U.S. underworld slang to the early 20th c.; the OED, to as early as 1899. As a verb meaning to complain, it goes back as far as 1888 and originally referred to acting up: “He’ll beef an’ kick like a steer an’ let on he won’t never wear ’em.” An even earlier usage as a verb meant to apply brute strength (“to beef up”), so it probably evolved from a describing a strong physical demonstration of displeasure.
Thanks!