When I started a recent “Weird Words” list with bananaquit, I never dreamed I’d see one a short time later.
Named for its bright yellow feathers — with the final “quit” imitative of its cry — the bananaquit is a small, colorful bird found in Central and South America … along with the Caribbean. I’d had it on my master-list for a while and felt it would make a nice alphabetical start to my Feb. 4 article — forgetting that just a few days afterward, my wife and I would head off to vacation on St. Croix, in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
After a couple of days snorkeling — and some rugged navigation of the island’s narrow, serpentine, heavily potholed “roads” — we made our way to Sandy Point Beach on St. Croix’s southwest tip. A National Wildlife Refuge and famed nesting site for endangered sea turtles, Sandy Point also happens to be the still-pristine locale where they filmed the final scene in Shawshank Redemption.
As we made our way through some brush toward the radiant turquoise surf, I heard an unfamiliar bird and opened my Merlin app — which instantly ID’d the call as a bananaquit. Now birders know that just because you hear it, that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to locate your bird in the nearest tree; but lo and behold, there the little fellow sat as if posing — on a low branch less than 10 feet away. Boy, was I excited.
We also relished our first-ever site of mongooses, which thrive all over the island — and another cool bird, the lovely Pearl-Eyed Thrasher, similar to its cousin on the mainland (very common in Central PA).
With all that in mind, I’m devoting the current “Weird Words” to more terminology from the Caribbean — starting with confirmation that mongooses is indeed the correct plural … like cabooses and papooses. (The word originates in a Far Eastern language and has nothing to do with geese.)
Or perhaps we really should start with the island group itself — which was named by Christopher Columbus, the first European to visit there (including a rather famed and bloody stop at St. Croix’s Salt Bay). Columbus named the archipelago after a mysterious, long-ago Roman virgin and martyr named St. Ursula — along with her equally obscure maiden retinue.
(By contrast, our U.S. state was almost certainly named for the British monarch at the time it was colonized — Elizabeth I, so-called “Virgin Queen.”)
Like many other Virgin Islands in both the U.S. and the British group, St. Croix is famed for its snorkeling — particularly at Buck Island Reef National Monument, reachable only by boat.
The snorkel — use of which offers one of life’s truly great pleasures — originally meant “airshaft for a submarine”; related to snore, it derives from German naval slang for “nose.”
(My thanks to the invaluable Online Etymology Dictionary for that material — and much of the other info here.)
On this trip, our most memorable underwater sightings included two flounders. Aptly derived from an old Swedish word for “flatfish,” this tough-to-see species lies like a sand-covered plate on the sea floor — with both eyes on the same side of its head! I was lucky enough to see one actually swimming into position at the island’s other famed snorkeling locale: the pier at the cruise-docking site in Frederiksted.
That city (and its larger St. Croix sister, the tourist-mecca Christiansted) both end with a term like our “-ville,” “-burg” and “-port” — often appended to names when dubbing a locale. Sted is Danish for “place”; like its English cognate stead (as in homestead and instead), it’s part of a massive word-family related to the Latin sta — meaning “to stand (in place).”
In English, this base can also be spelled -sist (consist, transistor) and -stit (institute, constitution); so you needn’t think hard to see that this little piece of Latin has given us literally hundreds of common English terms.
And while we’re on isle-related origins: reef is likely derived from its same-spelled homonym, which means the horizontal section of a sail. And thus it’s also connected to rib (remember that the F and B sounds are both made with lips!).
At various reefs around the island, we saw tangs (think Dory); eagle rays (spotted, with a white beak); moray eels; and the somewhat intimidating barracuda — a sizable fish that hangs motionless in the water looking for all the world like a German U-boat. None of those have a terribly interesting etymology, so we’ll finish with vacation, which is of course just a form of “vacate” — as in, leaving it all behind.
When I looked up that one at Dictionary.com, the sample phrase was: “a vacation in the Caribbean.” Those lexicographers sure got the right idea.
