tzaadi

Somewhere along the way, I developed an interest in the origins of words, probably as a result of exposure to the classical, so called ‘dead’ languages, Latin and Sanskrit. This was never a serious pursuit but I found it quite entertaining to discover remnants of older cultures, especially non-European ones, emerging from my use of English. I suspect that any way for a Black boy to throw off the yoke of Euro-think, was a subconscious joy…a rather small, personal victory.

Back in the 80’s, my word hobby received a weekly boost when National Public Radio aired a series with wordsmith and poet, the late John Ciardi. If you’re interested, a few podcasts from the series have been reposted on the NPR website. No matter what I was doing on Fridays, I found time to listen in on him to get my weekly fix. Some of those sessions hold a prominent place in memory, continuing to inspire. For me, the older the origin, the truer the meaning. Discovering the origins of a word is like archeology or time-travel. However, I don’t ‘need no’ fedora like Indiana Jones or an imagination like H.G. Wells, just pajamas (where does that come from?…oh it’s Persian!), a fast Net connection and Wikipedia, Google or the OED online (Oxford English Dictionary). By the way the word ‘fedora’ comes from ‘Fédora’, a popular French play by Victorien Sardou (1831-1908) that opened in 1882. The heroine, a Russian princess named Fédora Romanoff, was originally performed by Sarah Bernhardt, actress and notorious cross-dresser.

Here are a few discoveries:

Copacetic, (or copasetic or sometimes, as in Black vernacular, ‘copastetic’) meaning ‘very acceptable’, ‘just fine’. ‘Everything is copacetic’.

According to Ciardi, copacetic originates in the Hebrew phrase ‘(ha) kol beseder’, (literally ‘all in [the] order’) meaning ‘everything is alright’. The Seder or ‘order’ is the ritualistic retelling of the Exodus annually for Pesach (Passover).

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Ignite, meaning to ’set on fire’. Virtually every dictionary will tell you that ignite and its derivations originate in the Latin ‘ignis’ or ‘fire’.

However it actually comes from PIE or the Proto-Indo-European language and cultures associated with it. The root of ignite emerges from the Vedic culture of India, thousands of years older than Rome. In the Indian classical language, Sanskrit, ‘agni’ or ‘fire’ is both a noun and a deity. Agni is the god of fire, lightning and the sun.

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Lufthansa, the German airline, is a combination of two words from the Sanskrit, ‘lupth’ meaning ‘air’ or ‘invisible’ (‘luft’ is ‘air’ in German) and ‘hansa’ meaning ’swan’. When the air service first started, the aircraft they employed were pure white, resembling huge white swans as they disappeared into the distance.

Lufthansa Airlines logo

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Abracadabra (sometimes spelled Abrakadabra) is a word used as an incantation or theatrically by stage magicians.

The original Hebrew and later Aramaic was either ‘avda kedavra’, which means, “what was said has been done,” or ‘avra kedavra’, which means “what was said has come to pass.” Over time, it was corrupted to its current pronunciation with the replacement of both “v” sounds with “b” sounds (b and v can be interchangeable in Aramaic).

More recently, it was an incantation to be used as a cure for fevers and inflammations. The first known European mention was in the 2nd century CE (Common Era) in a poem called ‘De Medicina Praecepta’ by Serenus Sammonicus, physician to the Roman emperor Caracalla, who prescribed that the sufferer from the disease wear an amulet containing the word written in the form of an inverted cone.

Abracadabra as an amulet

Of late, we hear ‘Avra Kedavra’ in the Harry Potter series of books as a killing curse, but this is a gross debasement of its original intent. The original Hebrew ‘avara kedavara’, in a religious context, describes the matter-producing, life-giving utterance of G-d that created the Universe.

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We are inundated with words of African origins, but true to form, etymologists that study the roots of Indo-European languages typically overlook them, assuming that little of African origin is of real substance. So we are left with commodity words like banjo (Bantu), banana (Wolof), coffee (Amharic), jazz (Mandinke), jamboree (Swahili), mojo (Fulani), okra (Igbo) and many others.

In my research, I found one extraordinary African concept marginalized to a criminal degree. Before being sullied by Europeans, the word nigger (originally pronounced ‘en-jer’) was revered as the ‘divine epithet’ of the ancient Egyptians, who called themselves Kemites and their land ‘Kemet’, the ‘Black Land’ or ‘Ta-Merri’, the ‘Beloved Land’. N-G-R (‘en-jer’), a word without vowels like many classical languages such as ancient Egyptian or biblical Hebrew, was the word for G-d. In Kemetic society, the word for ‘nature’ which is interchangeable with deity, was ‘N-Y-T-R’ (‘net-jer’). Pronounce ‘net-jer’ then ‘nigger’ and one hears a clear, but problematic connection.

In many African languages particularly the Niger-Congo language family, words that connect with people, gods and groups often begin with ‘n’. For instance, the word ‘Nkosi’ in Xhosa (South Africa) is ‘god’. The word ‘Ndaba’ in Zulu (South Africa) is ‘council or gathering of elders’. ‘Negus’ in Amharic (Ethiopia) is ‘emperor’.

In this context, the study of word origins becomes significant. By knowing who I am, racist remarks and racial epithets become impotent. Every time someone uses ‘nigger’ to refer to a Black person, they are actually calling that person ‘god’.

Teach this to your children. It makes a difference.