Brazzil
February 2002
Language
Tea, Cocoa, and Chocolate
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Portuguese were great navigators and explorers. They not only "discovered" Brazil. They also found the passage to the East, to India, Sri Lanka, Indochina, China and Japan.
Wherever they went they left their "mouthprints". A few of those Portuguese words are still in current usage. On the other hand, they brought in their bags a number of Asian words. One of such words is chá (tea) which comes to us from the Chinese and Japanese. In slightly different version it exists also in Russian (chai). So, Portuguese is the only European language that does not call tea té, thé, thea, etc. but chá. Big deal!
When the turn came for Spaniards to do some exploring, they "discovered" Mexico. From there they brought quite a few words that meandered through the Continent and were eventually incorporated into English. For instance tomato. With the Aztecs, the Spanish explorers also learned to appreciate a refreshing Mexican drink called xocolátl—bitter water in Náhuatl, the language spoken by several nations of the area now called Mexico. The endings atl, etl, itl, otl, utl are a sound signatures of the old Mexicans. Compare with Popocatepetl and the very name of the country.
Thus, chocolate was a drink. It was made with the fruit—sometimes called a nut and/or a bean—of the cacahuátl (again the same atl suffix!). From it we got cacao. Which today is a universal term, sometimes spelled kakao.
Then a great confusion took place.
Europeans already knew the coco—a Portuguese word meaning a "head with a smile or a twisted face"—the fruit of an East Indian palm tree. And they enjoyed it. When cacao made its debut in Britain, the vagaries of English spelling and pronunciation led the poor 16th century Brits to scramble words to make a difference. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), that was when the term cocoa bowed in as the drink made with the bitter-sweet fruit of the cacahuátl tree.
Aiming at "simplifying," and to mark the difference, the English added nut to coco, made it into coconut. The French followed suit. To this day they call it noix de coco.
Actually, the Spaniards, in spite of having been the "discoverers" of cacao and chocolate, mixed up things hopelessly. Yes, they picked the Náhuatl word cacahuátl and adopted it to their language as cacahuete. But instead of distinguishing its original fruit, nowadays cacahuete means peanut (amendoim in Portuguese). Don't you think that peanut is rather silly too? The British _ who used to grow peanuts in Africa _ called it groundnuts.
Hockey Pokey
A reader sent me e-mail asking about the origin of the name Zamboni, a machine to shave the ice in hockey arenas. It's a proper name, after the Italian inventor and/or its manufacturer: máquina de raspar gelo de quadras de hóquei. I know that there are zambonis made by Bombardier and other companies—the same phenomenon as with gilete which in Brazil is an ordinary safety razor blade not necessarily made by the Gillette Co.
The zamboni looks like a heavy-duty riding grass mower (tosador de grama de auto-propulsão). To any person with some experience with a mower, and owner of gloves, a heavy coat and a cap, driving this machine is as easy as pie.
Another Italian name seems to be the case of Jacuzzi, a kind of round or oval bathtub with several outlets of hot and cold water under great pressure. It is known in Brazil as jacuzi or jacuze and is considered the top of pampering luxury. It comes in several sizes, all equally delectable. If you are thinking of getting one, perhaps you should begin with a Jacuzzi made for two.
Of course, these words are not English creations but adaptations of Italian terms. In every day life Americans also use a large number of Native Indian words. A few are more common in the West. Others are quite widespread in the East and sometimes all over the U.S.
Enthusiasts of Winter Sports love toboggan (pronunciation: tobógan) races. It is a kind of narrow sled (trenó) made of wood planks, usually curved at the ends. The Innuit (natives of the Arctic area of North America and Greenland, formerly called Eskimos) who invented this contraption and gave it a Micmac Indian word, use it to transport game, and all sorts of loads.
Sport, "real" toboggans, much more sophisticated and built for 2, 4, 6 and more people, take part in races and championships, zipping down a steep long man-carved sloping snow groove. Tobogganing is very fast and a quite dangerous sports.
Brazilians, who never saw a sled, a sleigh, or a true toboggan except in the movies or TV, unceremoniously took the word and apply it to any kind of playground slides on which children love to glide down sitting on their behinds, lying down on their tummies, or standing up, specially when water come cascading down the slide. Great fun for all concerned, kids and their parents. To them a tobogã is simply the slide, not any vehicle on it.
Going back to ice hockey. It's played usually indoors _ for the comfort of the audience. Instead of a ball they use a puck (disco) forcefully impelled by the J-shaped stick (taco) and thrown in the direction of the goal (gol) where the goalkeeper or goalie (goleiro) tries to stop it. The puck ricochets on the blades of the players' skates. Each team has about 20 players, including two goalies. Sometimes it seems that all the 40 guys are on the ice, but theoretically only six are in action for each team, at a given time: 3 forwards—the goal-makers—the goalie and two defenders. Interruptions may come at any time, for any reason. A champion offensive player who makes three consecutive goals in a game performed a hat trick.
Other sports also have their hat tricks, such as in the British lawn game of cricket, very popular in the British Isles and the entire British Commonwealth, including the former African, Asian, and Caribbean nations.
Wilson Velloso considers himself very fortunate. He began to learn English at home when he was 5 years old. The teacher was of a British housekeeper, Ursula Doss, who "happened" one day in the small town where the Vellosos lived, on the so-called Noroeste do Brasil Railroad, São Paulo State.
© 2002 Wilson Velloso