Case File #019.11.25: YAM

“I yam what I yam,” said the twentieth-century cartoon character Popeye the Sailor, “and that's all what I yam.” But his utterance of yam was in no way a reference to the root vegetable: it was, of course, simply the result of his slurring of the phrase I am. Furthermore, no credible scholar would claim that Popeye's poor diction played any part in the coining of the English term for the tuber that has long been a staple of American Thanksgiving dinners. In regard to the origins of yam, however, etymologists and lexicographers are not of one mind. Some believe the English noun first came into use around the end of the sixteenth century, and they cite the Portuguese inhame, the French igname, and the Spanish ñame as likely source words. Others concur with that time frame yet argue that yam came not via Portugal, France, or Spain but by way of West Africa, where the Twi language's phonetically similar anyinam refers to a yam-like vegetable. (This idea is bolstered by the fact that the first British mercantile efforts in West Africa took place during the second half of the sixteenth century.) But still others posit that the English word developed more recently, claiming its first recorded use was in colonial America circa 1700. According to this argument, yam was borrowed from the pidgin and creole languages used by African-American slaves, languages in which similar-sounding words such as nyaams and ninyam referred to tuber-like foodstuffs.

©2019 Michael R. Gates

Case File #019.11.06: GRAVY

When gravy first came into use in the late fourteenth century, it referred to a thick, spicy stew that was served as a dressing or side dish for fish or fowl. The word is an Anglicized form of the Old French grané —most etymologists and linguists believe the v came about as a misreading of the n in handwritten manuscripts, but there are some who postulate the existence of the unrecorded Middle French word gravé, a logical and likely descendant of the Old French, as the immediate antecedent of the English—and though grané meant “broth or stew,” it was itself a derivative of the Latin granum, which meant “grain or seed.” (Grains and seeds, or rather their flours, are traditional thickening agents for stews and gravies.) It wasn't until the sixteenth century that gravy came to mean “a sauce made from the thickened and seasoned juices of cooked meat.” And it was in the early twentieth century that it acquired its informal senses of “payment or benefits in excess of what is expected or required” and “unfair or unlawful gain.” The related slang phrase gravy train, which means “a source of easy money,” is also a twentieth-century neologism, one that originated among American railroad workers as a way of referring to any short but profitable haul.

©2019 Michael R. Gates