Word Histories: Etymologies Derived From the Files of the Dictionary of American Regional English

gringo

The day after the U.S. invasion of Panama a spokesman for the Panama Defense Forces told an interviewer that “General Noriega is at the head of his troops leading the resistance, which he has been doing since the invasion by the gringos.” During an earlier American military escapade south of the border—the 1846-1848 war with Mexico— soldiers under the command of Generals Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott tramped across the Mexican countryside singing a song whose lyrics were taken from a Robert Burns poem: “Green grow the rashes [rushes], O;/ The sweetest hours that e’re I spend, / Are spent among the lasses, O!” One derivation of gringo holds that the soldiers sang this song with such monotony that the words were drummed into the minds of the Mexican peasants—in particular the first two words, “green grow,” which sound like gringo.So strong was the association that the Mexicans began referring to the Yankees as gringos. The problem with this story is that gringo is attested to in a Castilian dictionary compiled in 1787; it defines gringo as the name given in Málaga to foreigners who have accents so thick that their Spanish is difficult to understand. In Madrid it referred especially to the Irish. This Spanish gringo, which was exported to Mexico, comes from Griego (Greek), the speech of foreigners sounding like so much Greek to the Spaniards. Greek has had a reputation for unintelligibility at least since medieval times, when the proverb Graecurn est; non potest legi (It is Greek; it cannot be read) was as common as our own expression “It’s Greek to me.”

floozy

“Go to jail, you floozy!” spectators called to Zsa Zsa Gabor as she passed by in the most recent Tournament of Roses Parade. The hecklers were animated by Gabor’s conviction late last year on the charge of slapping a Los Angeles police officer. According to one derivation, floozy has its roots in Flora, which was originally the name of the Roman goddess of flowers. Flora eventually became a popular woman’s name among English-speakers, with the pet forms Florrie, Flo, and Flossie; the last of these became a general term for a young woman, especially one who was attractive and had a hint of the lower class about her. Like the female pet names Moll, Katy, and Kitty (a wanton), Flossie soon connoted loose morals, and the word loose may have contributed to the evolution of flossie into floosie and floozy. There is, however, an alternative derivation. Flossie (fluffy, silky, soft) and its variant floosy are adjectival forms of floss (silk filaments, fluff), which is either from the Old French flosche (velvet pile, down) or an unrecorded Scandinavian borrowing cognate with fleece. Silky or flossy women’s clothing is fancy or showy (“I suppose I’ll have to dress. She’s sure to be all flossied up”—Iris Murdoch, Sandcastle, 1957). In this early use it was not necessarily unflattering to be called floosie ox floozy. The meaning may have been extended to include “impertinent,” “saucy,” and “flirtatious”—and thence to “a woman of disreputable character.”

cliché

Britain’s Prince Charles recently characterized the state of the Einglish language as “so impoverished, so sloppy, and so limited that we have arrived at a dismal wasteland of banality, cliché, and casual obscenity.” In 1725 the Scottish inventor William Ged patented a printing process in which a duplicate metal plate was cast from a mold of composed movable type. Firmin Didot and other French inventors perfected the process, eventually using papier-mâché to create the mold. Didot applied the name stereotype to this form of printing, from Greek stereo (solid) and type. The French die-sinkers called the metal plate itself le cliche, from the verb dicker, meaning “to click or clap”—the sound made when the mold was struck against near-molten lead to create a plate. Because the cliché was a duplicate of an original form, it became a natural metaphor for an idea or expression that was worn out and trite (“The farcical American woman who ‘wakes everybody up’ with her bounding vulgarities . . . is rapidly becoming a cliché, both on the stage and in fiction”—Westminster Gazette, 1895). The word stereotype similarly went on to achieve metaphor status. By the way, the prince’s remarks are barely the English of his ancestors at all, there being only one earthy Anglo-Saxon word in the quoted passage: sloppy. It derives from the Old English sloppe (dung), as in cusloppe (cowslip), a flower that thrives in pastures.