Made In America - Bill Bryson [87]
Many of the terms we most closely associate with cowboys and life amid the purple sage didn’t appear in the West until much later, if at all. Dogy, a motherless calf, memorialized in the song lyrics ‘git along, little dogy, git along’, has not been found earlier than 1903.30 Hoosegow, for a jail, didn’t enter the language until 1920. Bandits were seldom called that; banditti was the more common term. Bounty hunter, gunslinger and to have an itchy trigger finger were all the inventions of Hollywood scriptwriters.31
The lexical creations of cowboys, miners and other western Americans become incidental when compared with the legacy of Spanish terms from the West. These at one time numbered well over a hundred. Among the more notable survivors we find lasso (1819), sombrero (1823), patio (1827), corral (1829), lariat (from la reata, ’the rope’, 1831), canyon (1834), plaza (1836), burro, stampede and rodeo (1844), bonanza (1844), bronco and pronto (1850), alfalfa (1855), cinch (from cincha, a saddle girth; 1859), pinto (1860) and vigilante (1865).32
Often these words had to be wrestled into shape. Wrangler comes from caballerangero. Vamos became vamoose and then mosey. Vaquero, literally ‘cow handler’, went through any number of variations – buckhara, bakkarer, backayro, buccahro – before finally settling into English as buckaroo. The ten-gallon hat is named not for its capacity to hold liquids (it would have to be the size of a bath-tub for that) but for the braid with which it was decorated; the Spanish for braid is galón.
Sometimes the English spellings of Spanish words took some time to become established. As late as the 1920s, bronco appeared in a famous ad for Jordan cars in this manner: ‘Somewhere west of Laramie, there’s a broncho-busting, steer-roping girl who knows what I’m talking about.’ In the same way, G. M. Anderson, the first cowboy movie star, was sometimes represented to his fans as Broncho Billy, and the evidence suggests that it was pronounced by some as spelled, Meanwhile, rancher, from the Mexican-Spanish rancho, or ‘mess-room’, was often originally pronounced ‘ranker’.
The first English-speaking immigrants to the south-west also encountered Spanish-Mexican cuisine for the first time: tacos, enchiladas, tortillas and the like. Nachos are said to be named tor a certain Ignacio who made them particularly well, but the story, if true, is unsubstantiated. Unquestionably apocryphal is the old tale that Mexicans began calling Americans gringos because a popular marching song during the Mexican war contained the words ‘Green grow the rushes’. In fact, gringo is not a New World term at all. It was in common use in Spain in the eighteenth century. It is a corruption of Griego, ’Greek’, signifying unintelligible foreign babble, in much the same way as we say ‘It’s Greek to me.‘33
Many other terms that are sometimes lumped in with Spanish expressions brought into English by cowboys and ranchers actually entered English much earlier, among them adobe and mesa as early as 1759, calaboose (from calabozo, ’dungeon’) by 1792, and mustang (from mesteño or mestengo, signifying stray animals) in 1808. One of the more breathtakingly complex of these early adaptations was maroon. In the sense of being stranded, it began life as the Spanish cimarrón (literally ‘one who lives on the mountain tops’), and originally signified a fugitive slave in the West Indies. Then it came to mean the offspring of such a slave. Finally it arrived at its modern sense of suffering abandonment. But the Spanish also applied the word to a tribe of Muskhogean Indians (the ones we know as Seminoles). In the mean time, the French had picked up