Around the World in 80 Words E-Book

Paul Anthony Jones

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 334

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

From Monte Carlo to Shanghai, Bikini to Samarra, Around the World in 80 Words is a whimsical voyage through the far-flung reaches of the English language.What makes a place so memorable that it survives for ever in a word? In this captivating round-the-world jaunt, Paul Anthony Jones reveals the intriguing stories of how 80 different places came to be immortalised in our language.Beginning in London and heading through Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and the Americas, you'll discover why the origins of turkeys, Brazil nuts, limericks and Panama hats aren't quite as straightforward as you might presume. You'll also find out what the Philippines have given to your office in-tray; what an island with more bears than people has given to your liquor cabinet; and how a tiny hamlet in Nottinghamshire became Gotham City.Surprising and consistently entertaining, this is essential reading for armchair travellers and word nerds. Our dictionaries are full of hidden histories, tales and adventures from all over the world – if you know where to look.

Leseprobe

For my parents, Leon and Maureen

A book that travels, for everyone who can’t

CONTENTS

Introduction

1. London, UK Kent Street ejectment

2. Vire, France vaudeville

3. Saverne, France zabernism

4. Spa, Belgium spa

5. Neander Valley, Germany Neanderthal

6. Amsterdam, Netherlands ampster

7. Copenhagen, Denmark Great Dane

8. Oslo, Norway Oslo breakfast

9. Ytterby, Sweden yttrium

10. Helsinki, Finland Finlandisation

11. Dubna, Russia dubnium

12. Balaklava, Ukraine balaclava

13. Istanbul, Turkey turkey

14. Nicosia, Cyprus copper

15. Abdera, Greece Abderian laughter

16. Sofia, Bulgaria buggery

17. Skopje, Macedonia macédoine

18. Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina Balkanisation

19. Zagreb, Croatia cravat

20. Kócs, Hungary coach

21. Raków, Poland Racovian

22. Jáchymov, Czech Republic dollar

23. Kahlenbergerdorf, Austria calembour

24. Magenta, Italy magenta

25. Jura Mountains, France/Switzerland Jurassic

26. Monte Carlo, Monaco Monte Carlo fallacy

27. Porto, Portugal port

28. Jerez de la Frontera, Spain sherry

29. Gibraltar Siege of Gibraltar

30. Tangier, Morocco tangerine

31. Algiers, Algeria Algerine

32. Canary Islands canary

33. Timbuktu, Mali Timbuktu

34. Conakry, Guinea guinea

35. Brazzaville, Congo conga

36. Stellenbosch, South Africa Stellenbosch

37. Mocha, Yemen mocha

38. Cairo, Egypt fustian

39. Bethlehem, Palestine bedlam

40. Mount Nebo, Jordan Pisgah

41. Samarra, Iraq appointment in Samarra

42. Qumis, Iran Parthian

43. Bukhara, Uzbekistan buckram

44. Kabul, Afghanistan Afghanistanism

45. Deolali, India doolally

46. Colombo, Sri Lanka serendipity

47. Samut Songkhram, Thailand Siamese twins

48. Phnom Penh, Cambodia gamboge

49. Shanghai, China Shanghaiing

50. Shangdu, China Xanadu

51. Kagoshima, Japan satsuma

52. Manila, Philippines Manila paper

53. Makassar, Indonesia antimacassar

54. Tasmania, Australia vandemonianism

55. Karitane, New Zealand Karitane

56. Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands bikini

57. Klondike, Canada Klondike

58. Admiralty Island, Alaska, USA hooch

59. Hollywood, California, USA Hollywood no

60. Jalap, Mexico jalapeño

61. San José, Costa Rica Panlibhonco

62. Panama City, Panama Panama hat

63. Lima, Peru Lima syndrome

64. Stanley, Falkland Islands Falklands effect

65. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Brazil nut

66. Cayenne, French Guiana cayenne pepper

67. Daiquirí, Cuba daiquiri cocktail

68. Hamilton, Bermuda Bermuda

69. Buncombe, North Carolina, USA bunkum

70. New York, USA tuxedo

71. Toronto, Canada Toronto blessing

72. Labrador, Canada Labrador

73. Geysir, Iceland geyser

74. Limerick, Ireland limerick

75. Dublin, Ireland donnybrook

76. Glasgow, UK Glasgow magistrate

77. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK Newcastle programme

78. Gotham, UK Gothamite

79. Coventry, UK send to Coventry

80. Porlock, UK person from Porlock

Epilogue

Select bibliography

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION

It’s easy to forget that place names – just like first names, surnames, the days of the week and months of the year – are all still just words at the end of the day. As such, they have meanings, histories and etymologies all their own.

London, for instance, is thought to be the descendant of an ancient Celtic word perhaps meaning something along the lines of ‘town at the unfordable part of the river’.*Britain, meanwhile, probably derives from an equally ancient Celtic word, meaning ‘tattooed people’ – a somewhat appropriate name for what is now believed to be the most tattooed nation in Europe.

And it doesn’t stop there. Casablanca literally means ‘white house’. Beijing means ‘northern capital’, Nanjing means ‘southern capital’, and Tokyo means ‘eastern capital’. Chicago means ‘place of the wild onion’. Topeka means ‘good place to dig potatoes’. And Cleveland, Ohio, was named after its founder, Moses Cleaveland; according to local folklore, the extra A in Cleaveland’s name was dropped so that it could fit more easily on the front page of the local newspaper.

The Sudanese capital, Khartoum, has a name meaning ‘end of the elephant’s trunk’. The Tajikistani capital, Dushanbe, literally means ‘Monday’* – a reference to the fact that the city grew from a regular weekly market held on that day. And Funafuti, the capital city of the tiny Pacific nation of Tuvalu, has a name that means ‘banana woman’.†

But what if we were to turn these etymologies around? So instead of looking at the origins of the place names in our atlases and gazetteers, we look at the origins of the words in the dictionary that are themselves derived from place names? By doing that, we suddenly have a whole new set of stories to tell.

Some words of this kind – let’s call them ‘geonyms’ – seem obvious when you think about it. Turkeys, Brazil nuts and Panama hats are all familiar examples, as are French fries, Danish pastries and Jerusalem artichokes. But the stories behind even these familiar terms aren’t quite as straightforward as you might presume.

Turkeys don’t actually come from Turkey, after all, and nor do Jerusalem artichokes come from Israel. So what happened there? And as soon as you start to find out that Panama hats come from Ecuador not Panama, and that French fries were invented across the border in Belgium – well, things start to take something of an interesting detour . . .

It’s etymological stories precisely like these that bring us here now – at the start of a grand tour both of the world, and of the English dictionary. Ahead of us lies a 70,000-mile route, as the crow flies, and an itinerary comprised entirely of towns and villages, cities and countries (and at least one mountain) whose names have, in some way or another, become immortalised in our language.

Our journey will begin in London, from where we’ll head out across to France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, then north into Scandinavia, east into Russia, and south to the Mediterranean. From the Balkans, Central Europe, Spain and Portugal, we’ll travel down through Africa, north to the Middle East, then out across Central Asia to the Far East. From there, we’ll turn south once more, down through the islands of the western Pacific Ocean and stopping off for etymological tours of Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand.

Jumping across the Pacific Ocean, we’ll land in the far north of North America, making stops in Alaska, Canada, the western USA, and marking the 50,000-mile mark of our journey in Mexico. From there, destinations in Central and South America will take us as far south as the Falkland Islands, before we enter the home straight – heading north through the likes of Brazil, Bermuda, the eastern United States and Canada, before a solitary stop in Iceland breaks up our return journey across the Atlantic, back to the British Isles.

It will be an epic trip, no doubt about it. And along the way, there are some of the dictionary’s most extraordinary etymological stories to tell.

The tiny town in rural France that almost brought down the German government lies ahead of us. As does a valley outside Düsseldorf that gave us a word that altered our perception of human history. We’ll find out why a tiny Swedish mining town now finds itself honoured alongside the likes of Albert Einstein and Marie Curie, and what the people of fifty of the world’s nations owe to a tiny spa town on the Czech–German border. The story of how a village in South Africa gave us a word for a tactical demotion makes our list, as does the Jordanian mountain whose name has become a byword for a tantalising glimpse. And we’ll find out what the Philippines has given to your office in-tray, what Alaska has given to your liquor cabinet, and how a speech given by a bumbling North Carolinian gave us a word for impenetrable nonsense.

But every journey, as the old saying goes, starts with a single step. And ours starts with a step along a long-forgotten street in the south of London . . .

* Actually, the name London is something of an etymological mystery, and this theory – proposed in 1998 by Professor Richard Coates, then President of the English Place-Name Society – is just one of a number of possible explanations.

If not a Celtic word referring to the relative uncrossability of the Thames, London might be a Welsh-origin name meaning something like ‘lake fortress’. Or else it could derive from the name of the Roman goddess of the moon, Luna.

Or perhaps, as another theory claims, it takes its name from an old Celtic warrior, whose supposed name, Londino, might have meant something like ‘fierce’ or ‘wild’? Or maybe, as the twelfth-century historian Geoffrey of Monmouth claimed, the name derives from Lud Silver-Hand – a king from Welsh folklore, who is said to have saved Wales both from a plague of dragons, and from a magical giant who had the power to send people to sleep by playing music; to escape the giant’s soporific tunes, Geoffrey explained, Lud dipped his head in a bucket of water. (On second thoughts, that last theory isn’t quite as reliable as the others . . .)

* Actually, it literally means ‘two days after Saturday’.

†Funa is a feminine-forming suffix in the native Tuvaluan language, while futi literally means ‘banana’. The name Funafuti – ‘banana woman’ – is said to have originally belonged to one of the two wives of Telematua, the ancestral founder of the Tuvaluan nation, who supposedly named the town in her honour.

1

LONDON, UK

Kent Street ejectment

Bags packed? Passport ready? Good, because we’ll be making no fewer than eighty stops on this etymological trip around the world. And following the route of another literary circumnavigation, we’re beginning this journey in London.

But while Phileas Fogg’s eighty-day voyage began in the lavish surroundings of the Reform Club, we’re starting off in – well, a less grandiose setting. A poverty-stricken street in eighteenth-century Southwark, to be exact.

Places all across London have provided inspiration for countless words and phrases over the centuries, from an Aldgate draught, a punning name for a bad cheque (so called as Aldgate was once home to a well-used water pump) to a Westminster wedding, an eighteenth-century term for what one contemporary dictionary defined as ‘a whore and a rogue married together’. An interesting take on the Abbey’s popularity as a high-society wedding venue.

Because inmates at London’s Newgate prison were typically coupled together in pairs, to walk Newgate fashion is to walk hand in hand, while a Newgate nightingale was once a witty nickname for a jailbird in seventeenth-century slang. If you’ve ever been in financial difficulty then you’ve been on Carey Street, the Holborn address of the Bankruptcy Department of London’s Supreme Court (which now lies, somewhat ironically, beside the London School of Economics).

And if you’ve ever just missed the Tube or found yourself stuck in an endless London traffic jam, then you may have had cause to use Billingsgate, a seventeenth-century word for coarse language namechecking the notoriously vulgar-tongued vendors of London’s fish market.

On the opposite side of the River Thames from all these was Kent Street. You won’t find its name on any maps of London today, but you will at least find it in the dictionary under the heading of a Kent Street ejectment.

Kent Street was one of London’s most ancient thoroughfares, thought to have developed from a Roman road that once connected the city to Greenwich, Canterbury and Dover. Originally, little more than fields and open ground lay either side of it, but as London thrived this empty greenbelt was gradually eaten up by a sprawling network of houses and hostels, inns and taverns, and one of the city’s largest leprosy hospitals.

As a main road in and out of the city, by 1565 Kent Street had grown in significance enough to warrant the passing of an Act of Parliament ordering that it be paved. This sparked a further boom in housebuilding and development, but unfortunately for Kent Street, these dwellings were far from the most luxurious homes in the capital, and their tenants were far from the most affluent.

Soon, the entire Kent Street area had become synonymous with the very worst of London’s squalor and destitution, and those who ventured into it were quick to ensure they didn’t repeat the journey. In his Survey of London (1720), the English historian John Strype described Kent Street as ‘very long but ill-built’, and ‘chiefly inhabited by broom-men and mumpers’ (or street-sweepers and beggars, as we’d know them today). In his Travels Through France and Italy (1766), the Scottish writer Tobias Smollett labelled Kent Street ‘a most disgraceful entrance to such an opulent city’, that gave anyone unfamiliar with the capital ‘such an idea of misery and meanness . . . all the wealth and magnificence of London and Westminster are afterwards unable to destroy’.

Another equally evocative account from the late 1800s lamented Kent Street’s ‘evil reputation’, and described a street where it was not uncommon to find ‘men, women, children, asses, pigs, and dogs . . . living together in the same room’. Even Charles Dickens thought it ‘the worst kept part of London’ (second only to Haymarket, in his opinion), while one nineteenth-century dictionary spelled it out even more clearly: in a description of precisely what constitutes living the ‘high’ and ‘low’ life in London in the early 1800s, the lexicographer John Badcock had this to say:

White Cross Street, of a Saturday night, is low; and so is Petticoat Lane of a Sunday morning; and Kent Street, all day.

—John Badcock, Slang: A Dictionary of the Turf (1823)

All day every day, there was seemingly no escaping how ‘low’ life was on Kent Street. Its inhabitants were among the city’s poorest, their homes among its most miserable, and their landlords among its least sympathetic.

No matter the meagre circumstances, there was still rent to be collected on Kent Street, and woe betide anyone who fell into arrears. With no property worth seizing to cover the debt, insolvent tenants on Kent Street would often find themselves being swiftly and unceremoniously evicted via an uncompromising method that became known as the Kent Street ejectment:

Kent Street ejectment. To take away the street door [of a house]: a method practised by the landlords in Kent Street, Southwark, when their tenants are above a fortnight’s rent in arrear.

—Francis Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785)

That definition is the earliest record we have of a Kent Street ejectment, suggesting that the practice first emerged among the stoniest of the stony-hearted landlords of mid-eighteenth-century London. Use of the term (and, we can presume, the practice) steadily dwindled throughout the 1800s, and the expression has long since gathered dust in one of the more neglected corners of the dictionary; it’s remained little more than a historical and linguistic curio since the turn of the twentieth century.

Kent Street itself, meanwhile, has long since changed: renamed Tabard Street in 1877, after redevelopment and renovation in the early 1900s it’s now a perfectly respectable neighbourhood standing in the shadow of The Shard, one of modern London’s most impressive landmarks, and no longer one of the city’s main arterial routes.

2

VIRE, FRANCE

vaudeville

At its closest, the north coast of France is just twenty-one miles from the south coast of England. A byproduct of that geographical proximity is that over the past ten centuries England and France have found it all but impossible to resist the urge to invade one another. And at least one upshot of the greatest of all these invasions – the Norman Conquest of 1066 – is that roughly a third of the entire English language has its etymological roots on the opposite side of the Channel.

After his victory at the Battle of Hastings, the newly crowned King William I of England found it necessary to enforce his authority on his brand-new kingdom. As a consequence his native Norman French grew to become the dominant language of England’s legal system, politics, finances and military. Latin remained the high-status language of the Church and education, but with French now installed as the language of the law and government in medieval England, the English language was relegated to bronze-medal position:* it became little more than a day-to-day, low-status conversational language, used by an English-speaking population now translated into the unhappy subjects of a French-speaking king.

With so much business now being conducted in French, French-origin words naturally began to drift into the mainstream. Soon, English was awash with countless words and phrases imported by the victorious king and his attendant armies of ministers, bishops, knights, and – well, armies.

Words like royal, sovereign, crown, duke and baron began appearing in and around the king’s court. Judge, justice, jury, felony, verdict, bailiff and plaintiff drifted into the language of the law, while the military now spoke of armour, soldiers, archers, battles and guards. This linguistic Norman invasion continued apace over the decades that followed, leaving no corner of the language untouched, from the money we spend to the food we eat. So while the lowly Anglo-Saxons tended to their pigs, sheep, cows and calves, the ruling Normans enjoyed the fruits of their labour: the pork, the mutton, the beef and the veal.

That’s not to say that William the Conqueror is singlehandedly responsible for a third of your language being French, of course. It took several centuries for these and countless more words to become fully naturalised into our language. What’s more, English being the magpie language that it is, it has unapologetically continued to pilfer words from its neighbour across la Manche ever since, including several of those whose origins lie on the French map.

First on our itinerary is the picturesque town of Vire, roughly a hundred and fifty miles from Paris, in the rural west of Normandy. Vire has two somewhat infamous claims to fame. The first is that it ranks among the worst affected towns of the Second World War. On 6 June 1944, a relentless series of air raids unleashed a fire that raged so furiously the town’s church bells melted and 95 per cent of its buildings were burned to the ground. Happily, Vire was not obliterated entirely from the map, and after the war it rose from the ashes to re-establish itself. Which is lucky, should you ever want to pay your respects to the founder of vaudeville theatre.

Vire’s second claim to fame is that it was the birthplace of Olivier Basselin. Born around 1400, Basselin was a fuller by trade who operated a fabric mill alongside his wife on the outskirts of the town. But when he wasn’t busy fulling cloth, Basselin apparently liked nothing more than dabbling in his two great interests: writing crude poems and drinking songs, and consuming enormous amounts of good-quality wine, and even better cider.

Alas, we don’t know much more about Basselin and a great deal of what we do know has long since been shaped by centuries of lore and legend. But one thing we do know is that his crude songs and odes quickly proved popular, and before long much of sixteenth-century Normandy was singing along with what became known as his chansons de vau-de-Vire – his ‘songs of the Vire valley’.

As the popularity of his songs spread, Basselin’s bawdy style came to be imitated by other writers and performers, and this vau-de-Vire repertoire began to swell; by 1610, a local lawyer named Jean Le Houx had accumulated enough material to publish an anthology of Basselin’s and his contemporaries’ work.* But just as the popularity of these songs reached its peak, their etymological connection with their home town began to fade.

By the time Le Houx’s anthology was published, Basselin’s vau-de-Vire had morphed into a single word, vaudevire. Confusion with ville, the French for ‘town’, soon ensued, and before long these entertainments had come to be known by an entirely new name: vaudeville.

That word finally made its debut in English in the mid seventeenth century, by which point its connection both to Vire and to Basselin had been relegated to the footnotes:

Vaudeville: A country ballade, or song; a roundelay or virelay; so termed of Vaudevire, a Norman town, wherein Olivier Bassel [sic], the first inventor of them, lived.

—Thomas Blount, Glossographia (1656)

The word had changed, but as time went by so too did the entertainment itself. By the eighteenth century, vaudeville songs were no longer bawdy accompaniments to drunken binges, but light popular ditties and music-hall numbers, often with comic or satirical edges. By the nineteenth century, they had found their way into English and American theatres and playhouses, where they were joined on stage by an assortment of magicians, tumblers, comedians, strongmen, actors and impersonators. Ultimately, by the turn of the century, vaudeville had become a catch-all term for any kind of variety performance.

As for Basselin, rumour has it that he died fighting the English in the Battle of Formigny in 1450, one of the final battles of the Hundred Years War.

Another skirmish between the English and the French, you say? Surely not . . .

* This Latin–French–English hierarchy still reverberates in our language today. Need a basic, straightforward word to get your message across? You’re better off with something from the Anglo-Saxon end of the scale. Want something a little more formal? Try its French-origin synonym. On the lookout for something with a little gravitas, useful only in the most specific of contexts? Then Latin is the way to go. That’s why you might casually ask (Anglo-Saxon) someone what they got up to on their holidays. But as soon as you start questioning (French) or interrogating them (Latin) on their holiday antics, the implications of your line of enquiry suddenly seem much more significant.

* As a telling indictment of the precise content of these songs, on publication of his Le Livre des Chants nouveaux de Vaudevire, Le Houx reportedly travelled from Normandy to Rome to seek absolution merely for the sin of editing the book.

3

SAVERNE, FRANCE

zabernism

From Normandy, we head four hundred miles east to Alsace, the ancient region on the west bank of the Rhine sandwiched between modern-day France and Germany. As the fertile borderland between two of Europe’s greatest (and historically most bellicose) superpowers, ownership of Alsace has long been hard fought. It is prime European real estate – the geographical equivalent of the last slice of pizza – eyed up by ravenous tribes, dynasties, states and empires for centuries, and either snatched without apology or politely passed on.

From the Romans (who first laid claim to the region in the first century BCE) to the Germanic Alemanni tribe (who picked up where the Romans left off) to the Franks (who seized control at the Battle of Tolbiac in 496), Alsace continued to change hands, rarely without a fight, right through to the collapse of the region’s Nazi annexation in 1945. And this long war-torn history is reflected not only in Alsace’s distinctive language and culture, but by the battle-scarred stories behind many of the words the region has inspired.

During the Thirty Years War, 1618–48, Alsace found itself on the battlefront between the territorially ambitious Protestant armies of central and northern Europe, and the equally ambitious Catholic armies of the south and west. The war came to an end with the Treaty of Westphalia, which handed control of Alsace (albeit temporarily) back to France. But by then the conflict had taken such a toll that many of the region’s people had either fled or been killed, and as a consequence France imposed relatively little authority over it. All but ignored by the rest of the country, it came to be repopulated by an inharmonious mix of displaced and exiled peoples, each with their own cultures, priorities and notions of what was best for the future of the region. Before long, Alsace had slipped into an uneasy period of divided self-governance and widespread misrule.

France finally stepped in to establish full sovereignty in Alsace in 1681, but by then its reputation for lawlessness had become legendary, and Alsatia – the Latin name for Alsace – had morphed into a byword for any lawless or anarchic place, or anywhere operating as an ungovernable safe haven for criminals and miscreants. In English slang in particular, Alsatia became a cant nickname for the London precinct of Whitefriars, which had long been home to a Carmelite monastery with right of sanctuary, acting as asylum to an unruly assembly of rogues and petty thieves, outlaws, prostitutes, murderers and wrongdoers of all kinds:

White-Friars at London was a sanctuary . . . called Alsatia; thither many broken and disorderly persons repaired. They invented for themselves a sort of gibberish vulgarly termed Alsatian Cant. It must be acknowledged to the disgrace of our country, that some words issuing from that mint did obtain currency, and that people of quality came to use the dialect of whores and sharpers.*

—The Edinburgh Magazine, or Literary Miscellany (1788)

That Latin name, Alsatia, is also unsurprisingly the origin of the name of the Alsatian dog. But surely one the world’s most popular and charismatic dog breeds can’t have a tale of military unrest in its history too? Well . . .

Credit for the very first Alsatian dog, from which all others are now descended, goes to Hektor Linksrhein, or Horand von Grafrath as he was also known. Oddly those aren’t the names of some venerated German dog-breeder, but the actual canine forefather in question: born in 1895, Hektor was four years old when he was exhibited at a dog show in Frankfurt in 1899, where he happened to catch the eye of one Max Emil von Stephanitz. Stephanitz (it’s probably worth pointing out) was not a dog, but rather a former German cavalry officer and veterinarian, who had spent much of the 1890s working to establish a standardised national German breed of dog. Impressed by Hektor’s strength, stamina and intelligence, Stephanitz paid the princely sum of 200 marks for him, renamed him Horand, and established a breeding programme that saw him father litter after litter of puppies, each carrying its fair share of their father’s superlative genetic make-up.

Stephanitz named this new breed the Deutscher Schäferhund, or ‘German shepherd-dog’, a nod both to the dog’s homeland, and to the so-called ‘Continental shepherd-dog’ from which he presumed it had evolved. The breed soon proved popular, both as a working dog and as household pet, but just as Hektor and his offspring began to reach the peak of their popularity in the early 1900s, war once more erupted across Europe.

For four years, the continent was torn apart by one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history. By the time fighting ceased, four great empires had fallen, maps and borders had been redrawn, 35 million soldiers and civilians lay dead, and a widespread distaste for all things German had enveloped the Western world. Post-1918, anything or anyone bearing a German name or exhibiting even the slightest hint of German heritage fell victim to increasingly toxic anti-German sentiment.

Sauerkraut was one of the earliest and most famous casualties of this war on words, finding itself renamed ‘liberty cabbage’ in American stores and restaurants. Hamburgers likewise became ‘liberty steaks’ and frankfurters became ‘liberty sausages’. Even German measles began to be re-diagnosed as ‘liberty measles’. The questionably named towns of Berlin and Germania in Iowa, and Germantown in Nebraska, rebranded themselves as ‘Lincoln’, ‘Lakota’, and ‘Garland’ respectively. And even the British royal family wasn’t exempt: in 1917, George V felt compelled to sweep his household’s ancestry under the rug at Sandringham House, issuing a proclamation that changed their dynastic name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to the decidedly more English-sounding ‘Windsor’.

Naturally, it did not take long for the judgemental eye of this anti-German scrutiny to fall on the newly named German shepherd. In 1917, the American Kennel Club dropped the word ‘German’ from the breed’s name, and began registering all new puppies merely as ‘shepherd dogs’. But in the UK, the club went a step further: in 1919, it adopted an entirely new name for the breed emphasising its likely origins among domesticated wolves on the French–German border. The ‘Alsatian wolf-dog’, as it was first known, had finally arrived.

Happily, this anti-German feeling did not endure. Despite the tumult of the Second World War, by the mid 1970s several campaigns had successfully lobbied the Kennel Club into dropping this outdated euphemism and reinstating the breed’s original name. The first ‘German shepherd’ in fifty-eight years was registered in 1977, and although the term remains in popular use among owners and breeders today, the name Alsatian was finally dropped from the Kennel Club’s register altogether in 2010.

But before we pack our bags and head across the border on the next leg of our journey, Alsace has one more war-torn etymological tale to tell – this one hidden away in the very final pages of the dictionary.

Coined in the early 1900s, zabernism is the overzealous use or abuse of military power; to zabernise, likewise, is to bully or antagonise with military force. At the root of this linguistic curio is the Alsatian town of Saverne, thirty miles from Strasbourg, which in 1913 became the unlikely setting for a scandal of military heavy-handedness that would eventually throw all of Germany into a constitutional crisis.

At the time of the affair Alsace was part of the German empire, as it had been ever since France relinquished the territory following the Franco–Prussian War in 1871. Saverne was now a major Prussian garrison town known by its German name, Zabern, while Alsace was now officially the German Imperial Territory of Alsace-Lorraine, a province under the direct rule of the Kaiser, some five hundred miles away in Berlin.

Alsace has always had close cultural ties to its German neighbours, but at the time many people resented this forced return to German imperial rule* – especially with France’s ever strengthening appetite for republicanism and parliamentary democracy only a stone’s throw away. The German response to all this resentment was predictably heavy-handed: regional identity in Alsace was suppressed, with the use of both the French and native Alsatian languages all but prohibited. The response in Alsace, meanwhile, was largely defiant: with Germany wanting their ties to France inhibited, the Alsatians responded by circulating several new French- and Alsatian-language journals and periodicals.

By the 1910s, the people of Alsace had endured four decades of this uncomfortable German rule, and although Germany finally granted Alsace some autonomy in 1911 (allowing it to adopt its own constitution, flag and national anthem), these tokenistic gestures did little to quell the growing discontent. Before long, Alsace had become an uneasy powder keg of unrest, with only the slightest provocation needed to provide the spark. On 28 October 1913, that spark came in the form of a young Prussian soldier named Günter von Forstner.

Forstner was a hot-headed twenty-year-old lieutenant in the Prussian Army, who, despite his age, had already acquired a reputation as a bully and braggart among his fellow soldiers; on one occasion, he had reportedly struck down an Alsatian cobbler in the streets of Zabern for no reason other than that he had failed to acknowledge Forstner properly as he had walked by. On the morning in question, Forstner was overseeing a troop induction exercise at the Zabern garrison when a scuffle broke out among some of the new recruits. As he ran to break up the fight, Forstner angrily exclaimed that if it was a fight the recruits were looking for, they should go out into the town and pick a fight with a Wackes – a hugely derogatory German slur (derived from the same root as vagabond) for a citizen of Alsace.

Wackes was such a highly charged word that its use among members of the German Army had been banned in 1903. Not content with using it only once, Forstner continued his tirade. Should a fight break out in the town, he went on, then the recruits should not think twice about using their weapons, and he would personally pay 10 marks for every Wackes they killed.

His remarks, understandably, were incendiary, and when news reached the local press, a thousand-strong crowd* of protestors – many shouting, ‘Vive la France!’ – gathered outside the garrison. The German reaction, however, could scarcely have been worse: the authorities at first tried to play down the episode (even going so far as to question precisely how insulting a term Wackes really was), while Forstner’s superiors held back from reprimanding him for his insensitivity, and instead turned their attention to the handful of Alsatian recruits they suspected had leaked his words to the press. The recruits were arrested, the offices of a local newspaper were illegally raided, and unrest in the town reached a fever pitch.

Amid mounting pressure, Forstner was finally disciplined and placed under six days’ house arrest, but news of this reprimand failed to be reported to the people of Zabern, who wrongly presumed his actions had still gone unpunished. So when his detention was over and he returned to active duty, Forstner was still met with jeers and harassment on the streets of Zabern (as well as being the subject of the indelible and decidedly unpleasant rumour that after a particularly wild night on the drink, he had returned to his bed at the garrison, passed out in a drunken stupor, and promptly soiled himself). The relationship between the people of Zabern and the German Army had never been worse, but Forstner, now the despised laughing stock of the town, was not done yet.

Two weeks after his initial comments, Forstner’s inability to hold his tongue soon threw him back into the fray. Now back on duty, he casually explained to another group of recruits that should they have any thoughts of deserting and joining the French Foreign Legion, they could go and ‘shit on the French flag’ for all he cared. Once more, his behaviour had proved incendiary. News of Forstner’s crude jibe quickly spread far outside the garrison, and soon even further beyond the borders of Alsace. Before long, the eyes of France – and eventually those of the entire Western world – were turned to Zabern, as world leaders nervously awaited Germany’s response to the scandal and the mounting unrest in the town. A recommendation was made to the Kaiser back in Berlin for Forstner to be transferred to avoid risking any further gaffes and to defuse the situation as painlessly as possible. But the Kaiser, not wanting to see his military back down in the eyes of the people, refused: Forstner remained at his post, the protestors remained outside the garrison gates, and for a time the scandal rumbled on. Until, finally, enough was enough. With Zabern now under international scrutiny, on 30 November 1913, Forstner’s commanding officer, Colonel von Reuter, took it on himself to suppress the unrest in the town once and for all.

Reuter ordered sixty German soldiers, Forstner among them, to take up their rifles, fix bayonets, and march with him out into the town square. This show of strength, he wagered, would soon put the people of the town back in their place. So, with drums beating, and two machine guns hauled out alongside them, Reuter and his men entered the square and confronted the crowd.

The response from the townspeople was one of stunned disbelief. Those merely going about their everyday business stopped in their tracks, while those who had been protesting outside the garrison jeered, whistled and even laughed at Reuter’s ludicrously overblown show of force. He was furious. With, as he later recalled, the ‘prestige and honour of the whole army’ now at stake, he ordered the arrest of anyone ‘who stood still even for a second’ in the town square. The soldiers advanced, and total chaos ensued.

Anyone and everyone who happened to be in the square now found themselves a suspect accused of dishonouring the German Army. A banker returning home from work was arrested for smiling. A young man was arrested for singing. A company of judges exiting a nearby courthouse found themselves caught up in the commotion and thrown in jail for nothing more than standing still too long, as they looked on in disbelief at the pandemonium before them. In all, twenty-seven arrests were made, most for the very slightest of transgressions; when challenged on this heavy-handed and largely unnecessary show of strength, Reuter merely replied, ‘I am in command here now.’

The response to the events in Zabern that day was one of profound shock. Editorials the world over called into question not only Forstner’s, and now Reuter’s, actions, but those of the entire German military, who, according to the New York Tribune, had ominously started to ‘regard themselves not so much the servants of the state, but as the overlords of all mere civilians’. Back in Berlin, questions were raised in the Reichstag over the ability of the military to act as a police force; over who had the authority to challenge and police the military themselves; and over the rights of local people and local courts to stand against the military and enforce their own jurisdiction. A long-forgotten law from the days of the Napoleonic Wars, which permitted the military, under siege conditions, to quell riots when the local authorities failed to act, was hauled out of the history books and put under the constitutional microscope. Had the military in Zabern violated their constitutional limits? Had Reuter acted appropriately under strained circumstances? Question after question was raised and debated, but with little resolution. Eventually, facing a growing constitutional crisis and a vote of no confidence, the German Chancellor withdrew the entire garrison from Zabern. But to appease those in his parliament who had supported the military’s response, only the lightest of punishments were meted out to those involved. Although questions still remained unanswered and anger still raged, the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 abruptly ended the debate. The snowballing Zabern Affair had at long last come to a close.

By then, however, news of the crisis had spread far and wide, and zabernism, the overzealous use of military power or authority (or ‘military jackbootery’ as one 1921 dictionary defined it) had found its way into the language. The word has remained in occasional use – and, alas, has remained occasionally useful – ever since.

* The English playwright Thomas Shadwell satirised this state of affairs in his 1688 comedy The Squire of Alsatia, the preface to which included a glossary of local cant. So should you ever feel the need to disgrace your country and imitate a whore or a sharper, feel free to call your clothes your rigging; your watch your tattler; a gullible or easily duped person a putt; and a habitual cheat a tattmonger. If you’re rhinocerical, then you’re flush with cash, while if you’re blowsy or clear, in Shadwell’s terms, then you’re either ‘drunk’ or ‘very drunk’.

* Signed on 10 May 1871, one of the constituent clauses of the Treaty of Frankfurt, which officially ended the Franco–Prussian War, gave the citizens of Alsace a deadline of 1 October the following year to decide whether to leave Alsace and emigrate to France, or to remain where they were and become German citizens. Some 160,000 people – almost 10 per cent of the population – opted to retain French citizenship.

* Not a bad turnout for a town of just 8,000 people.

4

SPA, BELGIUM

spa

With three tales of war and warfare behind us, we leave France and head north into a country without which we’d have no saxophones, no contraceptive pills, no inline skates, no Brussels sprouts, and, oddly, no French fries.*