9. Cannibal: Eating people is wrong, an anthropophagite is a always bad phagite. We all know that – although we might suffer a little amnesia if we’ve just survived a plane crash in the Andes and there’s nothing to eat but crash victims. We know it happens, we don’t approve of it and most of us have no idea where the word ‘cannibal’ came from. The evidence suggests that it came from Christopher Columbus, the man who discovered the Carribean.
Initially, Columbus wanted to believe that he’d discovered the passage to the East and thus when the local natives referred to themselves as ‘Galibi’ he mispronounced their word and, instead, called them Caniba, as in Khan-iba. And from that comes the word ‘cannibal.’ Columbus was trying to imply that the natives were outlying subjects of a descendant of the Great Khan, whom Marco Polo had reported on a few hundred years earlier. Columbus also spread the rumor that these tribes were wont to eat people, but there’s no evidence that any Carribean tribes had a cannibalistic culture. Columbus was slandering the natives to provide a moral justification for enslaving them – which he promptly did. The dirty secret concealed under the heroic history of the great Columbus, is that good old Christopher was the guy who introduced slavery to America.
10. Woodchuck: How much wood would an otchek chuck if an otchek could chuck wood. ‘Otchek’, the Algonquian word for woodchuck, doesn’t make quite such a snappy little nonsense rhyme, which is probably why it was changed to woodchuck. It’s also odd that this little rodent has so many possible non-native handles such as marmot, groundhog, land beaver or whistlepig, but they are all far less poetic and hence the American Indian word is victorious.
However that’s not unusual. Many other native American animals have American Indian names:
- Raccoon is from Algonquian, where ‘arahkunem’ means “he scratches with the hands.”
- Jaguar is from Guarani ‘jagua’
- Coyote is from Nahuatl ‘coyotl’
- Cougar is Tupi ‘suasuarana’, meaning “like a deer” which it isn’t
- Chipmunk from the Ojibwa ‘ajidamoon’
- Moose from the Eastern Abenaki ‘mos’
- Quahog from the Narragansett ‘poquauhock’
This concludes my list of 10. But there are many that I’ve had to leave out. To mention just a few, there’s: hammock, canoe, anorak, jerky, sockeye (as in sockeye salmon) and even Canada. Canada means “big village”. The actual source word is not known because the Saint-Lawrence Iroquoian language, from whence it came, is now extinct. But in other Iroquoian languages the word lives on – in Mohawk, for example, it is “kana ta.”
10 Curse Words You Don’t Know
10 Insulting Words You Don’t Know
10 Nonsense Words You Don’t Know
10 Words You Don’t Know With Limericks
10 Units of Measure You Don’t Know
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~ Albert Einstein
