Origins

12 Comments

Vardibidian has a brief discussion of the Declaration of Independence, with a promise of further discussion of the rhetoric at some future date. I'm looking forward to that.

He also mentions Star Wars. For those inclined to celebrate the holiday by movie-watching, but not inclined to watch Star Wars, I wanted to make an uncharacteristically serious suggestion: National Treasure would make a good July 4th movie if you're not feeling entirely cynical about the holiday and about America.

Mostly unrelated: Saturday night around 10:45 p.m., someone in the neighborhood started setting off firecrackers or fireworks or something. They got more frequent, until by around 10:55 there was a steady thudding and thumping every few seconds. By 11:05 I was sick of it, so I called the police non-emergency number—just as the noise stopped. I reported it anyway, figuring they might keep an eye out in the neighborhood. And the dispatcher said, "Oh, yeah, Shoreline Amphitheatre is having a fireworks show tonight." I opened my mouth to say something snarky about that, and then realized it was perfectly reasonable and shut my mouth. And then thanked the dispatcher and got off the phone. I mean, 11 p.m. may be a little late for a fireworks show, but not too bad, especially on a Saturday night. It must have been really loud up close, though.

Interesting that I'm a lot more tolerant of an official fireworks show than of neighborhood people setting off their own fireworks. Maybe partly a question of how many people are benefiting?

Anyway. Entirely unrelated to any of that, I was tickled by a couple of place-name origins I learned just now:

  • Vauxhall is an area of south London, as well as the name of an Underground and train station. Turns out (according to that Wikipedia article) that the land was once owned by a widow who married a mercenary named Fulk le Breant; they built a house named Fulk's Hall; the name gradually changed to "Fox Hall, then Vaux Hall and finally Vauxhall." Which is all cute enough, but the really entertaining bit is that (according to a story given at answers.com) "Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, visiting London in 1844, was taken to see the trains at Vauxhall and mistakenly assumed that 'Vauxhall' (transliterated into Russian as 'vokzal') was the generic term for a railway station." Hence, the Russian word vokzal (Вокзал) apparently means "train station." I don't know whether to believe that etymology, but it's a great story.
  • And Cecil Adams provides (and semi-debunks) similar stories about the origins of kangaroo, Yucatan, and Nome.

(Thanks to Jillian, Aaron, JDMS, and Will.)

12 Responses to “Origins”

  1. Eliani Torres

    Yucatán. I am forever adding that accent (and stressing the syllable), when no one else does.

    *weeps great copy editor tears, though not as great as the ones over The Day Dalí Died*

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  2. Jed

    🙂 Yeah, my journal is still stuck in ASCII-land. Once in a while I remember to put the accent in San José, or the ‘Okina character in Hawai‘i, but more often, alas, I go with the Englishized versions. (Part of the problem is laziness, but part is just that I’m monolingual; I usually don’t know which words are supposed to get accent marks, or where.)

    However, just for you, I’ll make an effort to remember to put the accent in Yucatán from now on.

    Btw, in HTML it’s best to type “á” (without the quotation marks) for an a-with-acute-accent, and “í” for an i-with-acute-accent. Otherwise, readers using different operating systems may not see the right character. I’ve taken the liberty of changing those two characters in your comment.

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  3. Shmuel

    I vacillate between the “it doesn’t matter how it’s spelled in other languages; English has no accent marks” and the “it doesn’t hurt to put ’em in when you can” positions, myself. There seems merit to both arguments.

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  4. David D. Levine

    I heard a claim just this weekend that the French word for a transom (the little window over a door) is le vasisdas. Haven’t yet confirmed or denied this.

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  5. Jed

    Hee! I like “le vasisdas.” But I’m mighty dubious. Babel Fish suggests “traverse.” But Wikipedia says “In England it is usually referred to as a fanlight, and occasionally by the French word ‘vasistas.’ … Folk etymology ascribes it as originating with German chambermaids in France.”

    But I’m still dubious. Can any of y’all British folks and/or Francophones confirm or deny?

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  6. Lola

    The ARTFL Project at U of Chicago says that “traverse” is the French translation of “transom,” which seems familiar to me from when I learned French. I have never heard “vasistas” or “vasisdas,” which clearly are not French in origin, even if in usage. But the French Linguistics site (UK) says “vasistas” in French means “fanlight” in English. That’s all I know so far. If I remember, I’ll ask the French folks who run my gym (it used to be called Frog Fitness).

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  7. Chris Jacquier

    [Flack Jacket on.] Actually, “train station” in UK is very recent idiom for the proper term “railway station”. The rather hackneyed reason that ‘buses call at a bus station so trains call at a train station’ is a poor excuse.
    Until ten or fifteen years ago ‘Railway Station’ or just ‘Station’ was used to refer to the place at which railway trains called. Then the media seemed to propagate the other term because it was trendy to have those with regional accents and those with a ‘comprehensive education’ (ironically) report from the regions.
    It seems to me that it originated with those that spoke ‘Estuary English’ and was pronounced something like ”trine stysh’n”. ‘Train’ is attractive to those with limited vocabulary owing to its having fewer syllables to wrestle out of the mind and mouth. But that is conjecture.
    Most dictionaries seem to note the use of ‘omnibus’ in relation to a coach service and take it on slim authority to mean the conveyance itself but in UK the use of ‘omnibus for the conveyance was not universal by any means. In fact, I travelled to school daily on the North Western Road Car Company, of Stockport before it was taken over by Trent Motor Traction Company in 1970.
    I suggest that the ‘road car’ was derived from ‘stage coach’ or ‘stage carriage’ owing to the route along which such vehicles travelled calling at all stages and other stops, on request, in between the stages. Indeed, as far as pricing was concerned, it was practice by some of we schoolboys to walk to the next stop because it was thruppence cheaper from there to school owing to that stop being in the next stage’s fare.
    As for the railway, an ‘omnibus’ was a route or circuit, never a form of conveyance – that was the train, of course that ran on the route – also called ‘a railway’. Hence, ‘railway station’.
    I suggest, until I see concrete evidence to the contrary, that the use of ‘omnibus’, “’bus” or ‘bus’ is a misnomer if referring to a coach used to call at a number of intermediate places between its start and finish stations. Indeed they are in very common use in descriptions of telecommunications and electrical circuit applications throughout the world as acknowledged by most dictionaries, but have nothing whatsoever to do with a conveyance.
    I suppose by the same token, the term ‘common’ may also be applied to the use of ‘train station’, but that is the way language changes nowadays: ignorance and indolence encouraged by schools staffed by teachers taught in the dumbed-down, ‘comprehensive’ education system.

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  8. Jed

    Thanks, Chris; interesting comments about the shifts in meaning and usage over time, and I believe this is the first time anyone has ever used the word “thruppence” in comments here–others take note!

    However, as for your main points:

    1. To me, the terms “train station” and “railway station” mean exactly the same thing. I’ve almost never heard anyone use the term “railway station” in the US, at least in the western US. There are a few examples of American song lyrics that use “railway station,” but those are (a) over twenty years old, and (b) probably from the northeastern US. So, point being, I used the term “train station” throughout my entry because that’s the only term in common use in my part of the world. Given that I’m writing about the UK, I suppose I ought to have used the local term–except that I was unaware that there was a distinction in usage between those terms in the UK. Then again, if “train station” has been in common use in the UK for fifteen years, I might well have used it even if I’d known.

    2. I can’t speak for the UK, but in my part of the US, “bus” is quite simply the correct name for a particular conveyance. “Omnibus” is absolutely wrong in modern California, despite that being where the word “bus” comes from. (I’m a little confused, though: you seem to be objecting to the term “bus” for something that runs on rails. Where I come from, a bus runs on wheels, like a much bigger version of a car. (Or “automobile,” I imagine you would insist.) There are trolleys, but let’s not drift too far from the topic at hand.) “Bus” in this sense has been in use longer than you or I have been alive (MW11 gives a first-use cite of 1909). Again, usage may be different in the UK (but MW11 is usually good about giving British usage notes), but I suspect that the vast majority of other British people would not agree with you that “bus” is an improper term for a conveyance. Words get abbreviated all the time; I can’t even tell why you object to this particular abbreviation. (Furthermore, as far as I can tell, the term as used in computers derives from the term as used in transportation, so I can’t see how the computer term could be legitimate if the transportation term isn’t.)

    3. I disagree that (a) language changes these days only through ignorance and indolence; (b) language used to change in some other purer way that made change okay; and (c) the way in which language changes affects the legitimacy of the change (and therefore whether one can accept the change). My view: language changes, period. Some changes are more accepted among educated speakers than others, but that degree of acceptance (of a given change) also changes over time; some terms that used to be considered slang are now considered part of the general vocabulary.

    But really, the summary of all this is that you appear to be a prescriptivist, while I am largely a descriptivist (with a few prescriptivist tendencies). So neither of us is likely to convince the other.

    (However, I was sincere in my thanks up above; I appreciate your having taken the time to write an extensive comment, and I’m always glad to hear from people who care about language, even when I disagree strongly with them.)

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  9. jacob

    Re: 2

    I can’t be sure, but it looks to me as though our new correspondent is saying that the word “ominbus” referred to the route that a conveyance (in this case a railway train) took, and therefore it can’t be correct to use it to refer to a conveyance.

    But of course meanings shift by association as well as by refinement of original meaning. “Toilet”, as I understand it, referred to the actions of dressing and washing and so forth, then came by association to mean the room in which those activities took place, and then came by a second association to mean a particular appliance in that room, used for something else altogether. Similarly, even if omnibus began as describing the route, now it means the conveyance.

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  10. Vardibidian

    It’s also worth noting that in American English (which is divided from, rather than fallen from, English English), one would never, ever, ever refer to a bus as a coach. In the US, one can travel coach, meaning in the cheap seats, usually of an airplane, but not on a coach, unless I suppose one is travelling on a Conestoga wagon (or Prarie Schooner). Given that the US was nicely settled by the end of the eighteenth century, it’s hard for me to grant either US or UK usage primacy for things that weren’t invented until the twentieth.

    And I don’t think the trolleys are entirely irrelevant. I’m not sure how, though. Most (well, many) large US cities had streetcars, trolleys, els or subways that ran on rails; I suspect that railway station was considered at some point insufficient to distinguish between the trolley stops and the stages where the trains stopped. Er, for English readers, I am referring to American subways, of course, which are underground trolleys, rather than pedestrian underpasses.

    Of course, in Boston, the El ran underground for a substantial portion of its length, and the subway ran on street level for a stretch, and for a portion was elevated (still is? Has New North opened?). But if you’re confused, you are probably on the wrong car, and should go back and change at Park.

    Thanks,
    -V.

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  11. Arthur Evans

    Re: “never, ever, ever refer to a bus as a coach.”

    Actually, in American English, we do. Sometimes. The word “coach” seems to be used mostly to refer to fancier vehicles used for chartered trips and tours, as opposed to city buses. For example:

    http://www.usabuscharter.com/

    You could say this is an affectation of the transportation industry, to try and rid the luxury coach of any associations with the plebian bus. I ‘m not saying that you’d be wrong. I’m just saying–I’ve heard people use the word.

    Cheers,
    -AE-

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  12. Michael

    I have heard that the term “vasisdas” for a window above a door is used in France since WWII, because of the Germans in France at the time. They didn’t have those little windows, so when they saw them they would say “was ist das?”, meaning “what is that?”. I heard this from a man who moved to Canada, where I live, from France, and he was something of a facts buff. He also made fun of French stop signs in Canada (not all of them are French, just the ones in Francophone areas) because, as he put it, “in France, the stops signs… they say stop”.

    In Eastern Canada, the only time I’ve heard the word coach used for a bus is when it is an expensive chartered jobby. The sort of thing that’s really tall, with tinted windows, and all painted snazzy.

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