Around the World in 80 Words

Starred review from August 3, 2020
Etymologist Jones (Word Drops: A Sprinkling of Linguistic Curiosities) delivers a fabulous and erudite survey of words inspired by place names. Some of his examples are well-known and look straightforward, but have more involved origin stories than readers might have guessed. The manila folder, for instance, ended up sharing its name with the Filipino capital because it was originally made from manila hemp, a source of cheap paper grown exclusively in the Philippines. Meanwhile, Turkey lent its name to a species of North American wildfowl thanks to the tendency of Europeans, while exploring the Americas, to use “turkey” as a catchall term for exotic bird species. Other words are lesser-known but equally fascinating, including the archaic vandemonianism, or “rowdy behavior,” from Van Diemen’s Land, today’s Tasmania and a onetime penal colony. Many of Jones’s entries illustrate the tangled process of linguistic evolution, with “vaudeville” mutating from “vau-de-vire,” from a town in Normandy known for a raunchy medieval singer, and the Indigenous name for Alaska’s Admiralty Island, Xootsnoowú, having been Anglicised and truncated by visiting sailors—among whom the potent moonshine brewed on the island was legendary—to “hooch.” Logophiles will have a ball.