I’m a word nerd and proud of it, and not just in English, either.
I used to love taking out the Usborne language guides for kids from Rushall Library as a child — I can’t remember now if they were the Picture Dictionaries or the First Thousand Words in… [insert language] — but whatever they were, I loved them. The French ones paved the way for my lifelong relationship with the French language (rusty as it currently is); the German ones were my second best friends, but I never really got on with the Spanish ones, for some reason.
Look how many languages Usborne offers now! (I’ve just stopped writing this post long enough to search for and add secondhand copies of First Thousand Words in Arabic, Japanese and Mandarin to my Ebay basket!)
As another side note: my beloved Rushall Library (my childhood home suburb in Walsall) is no more. The place where I connected with a whole world beyond the Black Country — the tiny building from which I broadened my horizons with books on languages, literature, mythology, science and geography — has long since closed, a victim of Local Authority cuts to library services like so many others across Britain. It’s now a community hub, one which advertises its activities in Facebook posts typed in Comic Sans, where proper nouns are left uncapitalised and where everyone is addressed as “hun”.
Before this abbreviation of “honey” and the culture that goes with it became mainstream, “Hun” was most often a loaded, derogatory word in English, referring originally to the nomadic Central Asian people whose famous leader in the mid 5th century was Attila. Later on, due in no small part to Rudyard Kipling and his 1902 poem The Rowers, “Hun” became synonymous with Germany and the German people. Later still, it has often been applied to Protestants in Ireland, and to supporters of Rangers Football Club in Scotland.
The implication was and always is of an uncivilised, destructive person, a savage, a brute, a vandal — a barbarian.
One of the authors I encountered and really enjoyed during my first year studying French at university was Michel de Montaigne (1533 – 1592), a philosopher and prolific essayist who had a lot to say on a lot of topics, much of which still feels meaningful to the world we live in today. The particular work we studied was Des cannibales (“Of (the) Cannibals”), written in 1580 — there are translations all over the Internet if you want to read it in English, and I’d recommend tracking down more than one, just to help you piece together your own particular feeling about what Montaigne is getting at.
(While you’re at it, in amongst the acres of online analysis of Des cannibales, you could do worse than start by checking out this piece by Megan Sickmueller in Retrospect Journal, Edinburgh University’s history, classics and archaeology magazine.)
One of Montaigne’s key phrases in the essay is: <<Chacun appelle barbarie ce qui n’est pas de son usage>>. The Canadian academic Ian Johnston renders it nicely as “Everyone calls things which he does not practise himself barbaric.” Montaigne identifies a universal and timeless tendency for people to feel something along the lines of “They don’t live/think/speak/worship/eat the way we do, so they’re weird, bad and wrong.” History (past and current) shows that it can be all too short a step from there to individuals, societies or nations deciding that it’s okay to marginalise, criminalise, persecute or eradicate the weird, bad and wrong people.
(Montaigne, in case you’re wondering, uses his essay to suggest we should take a good hard look at ourselves and our own values and behaviour, before we rush to condemn or vilify anybody else. Writing this at the start of a year with more than 40 upcoming international elections, now would be a good time for a lot of people to think about what Montaigne was saying over four centuries ago.)
Incidentally, I always thought the word “barbarous” and its offshoots was derived from the Latin word for beard, barba, maybe on the vague basis that at one time, civilised men might be expected to shave their faces and uncivilised ones might be expected to let their facial hair run wild. But in fact, its origins lie in the Greek word barbaros, from the perceived bar-bar — sounds produced by foreigners which were incomprehensible to Ancient Greeks — “They don’t speak the way we do, so they’re weird, bad and wrong…”
