Not a Pig. Not from Guinea.

Andrew Taubman

Description

Guinea pigs are from South America yet Guinea is in Africa! And of course they are not like pigs. Why do we call them Guinea Pigs?

Not a Pig Not from Guinea is a light-hearted book about the misleading place-names we use for ordinary things in everyday English.

Sujets

• Humor
• Language

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 22 novembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456632236
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 7 Mo

Extrait

Not a Pig. Not from Guinea.
Misleading Places
of Origin in
Everyday English
 
 
by
Andrew Taubman
with illustrations by Andrew Joyner
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Copyright 2018 Andrew Taubman.
All rights reserved.
 
 
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com
 
 
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-3223-6
 
 
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
 
 

 
ANDREW TAUBMAN was born at an early age – the mid 20th century to be imprecise – in the bustling wastelands of what was then either outer suburban Sydney or the inner out-back, depending on which way you faced. Of his upbringing he says little and, by an act of will, remembers less. His ability to feign knowledgeability has stood him in good stead throughout his life, as the astute reader of the present volume will rapidly confirm. His unbecoming glee on those occasions he is able to slip a letter past a newspaper editor when they are too busy to pay full attention verges on the unhealthy. He lives in the penthouse of a cheesy cottage with absolute waterfront in the basement alongside two dogs, a feral budgerigar, a cockatrice and a basilisk, a long suffering family – whose, he is not sure – and is a veterate liar. This is his first book.
 
Contents
Introduction
Alsatian dog
The America’s Cup
Arabic numerals
Australian crawl
Australian shepherd dog
Baked Alaska
Balinese cat
Battle of Bunker Hill
Béarnaise sauce
Bohemian lifestyle
Brazilian wax
Canada thistle
China clay (kaolin)
China syndrome
Chinese burn, fire drill, water torture, whispers
Chinese chequers
Damascus steel
Damask
Danish pastry
Derby hat
Devon
Dutch courage, treat, uncle, wife
Dutch cap
Dutch elm disease
English disease
English horn (cor anglais)
Fez
French cricket, cut, gout, kiss, leave, letter
French fries
French polish
French toast
Georgia peach
German cockroach
German measles
Great Dane
Guinea pig
Hawaiian pizza
Hollandaise sauce
Holstein (Friesian) cattle
Idaho potato
Indian giver, summer
Indian rubber
Irish carbomb beer cocktail
Jerusalem artichoke
Kentucky bluegrass
Kiwifruit
Lavender English, French
Limes Tahiti (Persian), key (Mexican)
Lucerne (alfalfa)
Madeira cake
Maltese cross
Muscovy duck
Norway rat
Orange: free state, house of, Pekoe principality of, river, William III of
Outer Mongolia
Panama hat
Parmigiana
Philadelphia cheese
Pomeranian dog
Roman holiday
Romania
Salad dressings French, Italian, Russian, Thousand Island
Scotch mist
Scotch tape
Scotch woodcock
Seville orange
Shanghai
Spanish flu
Spanish fly
Spanish Harlem
Spanish Inquisition
Spanish moss
Spanish onion
Swiss roll
Tabasco sauce
Trojan horse
Turkey (bird)
Turkish bath
Ugandan affairs
United Arab Emirates, Arab Republic, Kingdom, Nations, Provinces, States
Venetian blind
Welsh rabbit/rarebit
Acknowledgements
 
Introduction
This book began, as I expect many do, in idle conversation in bed one Sunday morning. I was (as usual, my partner would say) showing off my general knowledge of the little-known origins of such common words as denim when guinea pigs raised their cute little heads. I knew they came from South America, so why Guinea? And when it came to that, why pig? That train of thought raised other toponyms such as Panama hats, which I knew originated in Ecuador – so why Panama? More generally, why are some things named after places they do not come from?
Dictionaries, wikipedia, cookbooks, encyclopaedias, The Straight Dope message board, our own aging brains and those of like-minded friends were all mined for candidate words and phrases.
Perhaps the most surprising outcome of my initial investigations of the hundreds of possibilities that arose from this process was how many geographically- based terms were real and so had to be struck off the list – brazil nut, manx cat, hamburger and many more were either unquestionably from where they sounded like they were, or had origins so obscure or contested that there was no interesting article to be had from them. Ireland was a particular disappointment: Irish coffee, stew, setters, moss, wolfhounds and whiskey all actually came from there. Fortunately to my rescue came the French and Dutch; or more correctly the English penchant for naming things they found distasteful after the nation they happened to currently be at war with – hence such pejorative terms as French leave and gout, Dutch courage and treat.
Readers shouldn’t take this book as the absolute last word on any topic I’ve covered. In some cases I’ve glossed over detail or elided some dispute over origins that I felt didn’t affect the core of that item’s story.
 

Alsatian dog
The German shepherd dog is a surprisingly modern breed which was not registered and named until 1899. The name is admirably descriptive as it was bred and named in Germany (as Deutscher schäferhund ), by Germans, for the purpose of herding sheep – and is to all appearances a dog.
During and immediately after World War I (1914–18) anything overtly Germanic acquired something of a taint in the Allied countries, to the extent that many people with last names like Kaiser, Bismarck or German changed them to something more “patriotic”; many towns such as Germantown and Hahndorf met the same fate (although most have since changed back). This extended as far as royalty when in 1917 King George V proclaimed that the ruling house of England would henceforth be known as Windsor (after Windsor Castle) instead of its historic title Saxe-Coburg-Gotha – the immediate spur being the first German air raids on London by the Gotha heavy bomber.
 
 

 
 
Where royalty go dogs are sure to follow, and the loyal, strong and hard-working German Shepherd had already found a place in British life. But the Teutonic name was seen to be harming the reputation of the breed and so it was changed, at first to Alsatian wolf dog, then when this damaged its reputation even further (this breed of dog being no more wolf than any other) simply to Alsatian. Alsace was one of the two French provinces annexed by Germany after their victory in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 (Lorraine being the other) and a prime cause of French resentment toward the Germans, so this choice of name was something of a gesture of solidarity with the beleaguered French.
As was the case for many of the renamed towns good sense and tradition eventually triumphed over prejudice, and the Alsatian officially reverted to being the German shepherd in 1977.
The America’s Cup
Yes, that apostrophe is correct and correctly placed. This oldest of active international sporting trophies– in contention since 1851 – is not The Americas Cup, The Americas’ Cup, The American Cup or The America Cup, despite yachts from the United States having won every one of the regattas until 1983 – the longest winning streak in sporting history. It is not named after the country or the continent either, nor because the actual cup belonged to the US- based New York Yacht Club – although it seemed at times they believed it was theirs by right, having bolted it to the clubhouse floor in the 1970s after rumours that Australian sailors were going to have it by hook or by crook after yet another loss.
Instead it is simply named after the schooner America , the first boat to win the competition by representing the New York Yacht Club in 1851. That first race was run around the Isle of Wight in England, with America defeating 15 yachts of the Royal Yacht Squadron by a full 8 minutes, a margin so great that supposedly when Queen Victoria asked who came second she was told “Ah, Your Majesty, there is no second.”
Arabic numerals
The ancestors of what European languages call Arabic numerals (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) were invented by Indian mathematicians between 250 B.C. and 500 A.D., along with the concepts of zero and decimal positional notation. Without these the European renaissance, western mathematics and science in general are barely conceivable, as anyone who has tried doing long division in roman numerals will attest. They spread to Persia by 825 A.D. , then to North Africa, and were introduced into Italy in 1202 by the Pisan mathematician Fibonacci (he of the famous Series), who had come across them in Algeria and realised how much easier they made mathematics and accounting.
 
 

 
 
Despite their name, the ten digits we’re so familiar with are not used in significant areas of the Arab-speaking world such as Egypt and Sudan, nor in the Asian non-Arabic Muslim nations of Iran, Afghanistan or Pakistan; these all use the eastern Arabic numerals  . Western Arabs (Libya to Morocco) use essentially the same characters as Europeans; both sets derive from the same source, as one can most easily see from the 1 and 9 equivalents. In Arabic both varieties are known as Hindu numerals, a more correct attribution than “Arabic numerals” which refers to where the West came across them rather than where they originated.
Australian crawl
This entry does not refer to either the rather good Australian rock band of the 1980s, or the national cultural cringe that led them to adopt that name; rather it’s the swimming stroke also known (with minor variations) as the American, front, or forward crawl, or the Trudgen. As with so many misnomers in the English language it acquired its name from the first encounter the English public had with it rather than from any actual or fancied place of origin. This swimming style is so patently obvious and efficient that it must have been in use since time immemorial, and so has no single place of origin. North and South American natives and