“You say ‘tomato’, I say ‘tomatl’, but that’s only because I’m speaking Nahuatl.”

Nahuatl was the language of the Aztecs, who dominated Central America until the Spaniards arrived. They grew xitomatls – the words means “plump thing with a navel” – but the word was contracted to ‘tomatl’ prior to its adoption by the English language. It’s not a surprise that ‘tomato’ comes from an Amerindian language, but there are a few words that have made it into our language from that source which are a little more surprising. Here are ten of them:

1. Barbecue: The word barbecue has been the subject of etymological dispute. There was a theory that the derivation was French. This theory insists that the French visitors to the Carribean in the 18th Century witnessed a pig being cooked whole by the locals and said “Sacrebleu, ils cuisent le cochon de barbe à queue,” (Gosh! They are cooking the pig from beard to tail.) There are two strong objections to this etymological theory:

1. There was already a word in the local Taino language, ‘barbacoa’ for this method of cooking a pig, which sounds suspiciously like barbecue. Barbacoa means “scared fire pit.”
2. Even the French are aware that pigs don’t have beards.

So the world has concluded that ‘barbecue’ is a corruption of the Taino ‘barbacoa’ However, the barbacoa method of cooking a pig did not involve laying it on a grill or even roasting it on a spit above a fire. Here’s the original barbacoa method:

I know what you’re thinking. “Where do I get the maguey leaves?” I’m not going to deceive you on this. You won’t find them in the local supermarket. Maguey leaves are still sold in some markets in Central America, but not many. However, they are utterly indispensable for this recipe, because they caramelize when cooked.  If you can’t get the maguey leaves, my advice is: slap the pig on the barbecue you bought from Home Depot and cook on a low light.

2. Buccaneer: Strange as it may seem, the buccaneer is more closely related to our idea of a barbecue than a barbacoa is. What am I talking about? A buccaneer is someone who likes barbecues. A good number of early French settlers of the Spanish West Indies became woodsmen and hunters. I hope I’m not demeaning them here, but history relates that they were a little unruly. In fact; they were lawless. In fact, they were goddam pirates. The Spanish tolerated them for a while, but cracked down on them around the end of the 17th century and scattered them to the four winds. They were called ‘buccaneers’ from the French boucanier, because they preferred the grill to the fire pit. The boucan was a native grill (mukem in the Tupi language) for cooking meat over open flame, rather like, er, a barbecue.

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