Surprising origins

The origins of certain words and phrases can be surprising, even a little disappointing.

Take for example the word buccaneer,  now that the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are the Super Bowl champs. The word suggests something swashbuckling and daring, criminal yet heroic at the same time. Yet Bill Bryson notes in Made in America that the word comes from boucan, a wooden frame on which Spanish mutineers would smoke wild hogs.

Ben Zimmer made the same point in his Wall Street Journal column last weekend. He also noted we get the word barbecue from barbacoa, a Caribbean islander word for the same cooking method. So we might as well call the NFL champs the Tampa Bay Barbecuers. (This reminds me somehow that when I was a student at Ohio University, in reference to the Ohio State Buckeyes up north, a buckeye was commonly referred to as "a worthless nut.")

Chicken a la king sounds like a dish fit for royalty. In fact, Bryson explains, the original name was chicken a la Keene. A man named Foxhall Keene was a prominent diner at Delmonico's restaurant in New York City, where the dish originated. The name was changed through mispronunciation.

You can't go to a professional baseball game without singing, during the seventh inning stretch, Take Me Out to the Ball Game. The song, which is actually the chorus of a song, was written by two men who had never attended a baseball game in their lives, according to Bryson. The song itself is about a young woman named Katie Casey whose beau offers to take her to a show. She makes a counteroffer and suggests he take her out to a ball game instead.

Some of the minor-league slurs long in use originated with men's names, Bryson tells us. We get yokel from the German version of Jacob. Hick started from Richard back in the 14th century. Rube, less surprisingly, came from Reuben.

Bryson says that Maxwell House coffee got its name from a Nashville hotel, the Maxwell House, and its slogan, "good to the last drop," from Theodore Roosevelt, who expressed that opinion about the coffee. Before Coca-Cola's slogan became "the pause that refreshes," it was the more cumbersome "the drink that make a pause refreshing."