Word of the Week: January 29, 2001
Barbecue Jerky

When Europeans came across the Atlantic, they found many things, including lots of food that was new to them. In fact, they would never have tasted barbecue or had jerky without the contributions from the New World.

You see, jerky is from the Quechua word ch'arki. The Quechua were the ruling tribe of the Incas. The apostrophe in ch'arki represents a "stop," like that little tiny thing that happens at the very beginning of the way most people say "America." And barbecue comes ultimately from perhaps Guianan natives, perhaps from the Taino (Arawakan people of the Caribbean), who used a babracot (so says the Oxford English Dictionary), which led to our word barbecue. There is an amusing folk etymology (folk etymologies are false etymologies that sound too good not to be true) which says barbecue is from the French barbe a queue ("from beard to tail"), but it meets with no favor from the experts.

Writing all this makes me hungry enough to eat some barbecue "barbe a queue" myself! Bon apetit.

Words of the Week are written by Dr. Jacques A. Bailly.