Etymologies

Walter Ancarrow’s debut collection, Etymologies, doesn’t stop with the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology and Merriam-Webster for inspiration; sources also include The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers and Arabs: A 3,000 Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires. Ancarrow's Etymologies, mostly comprised of brief prose pieces, opens with three words: “ahuakatl / aguacate / avocado,” encompassing Aztec origins, Spanish colonialism, and branding at the hands of California farmers in the early twentieth century. This entry, and the collection’s closing two words “banana / banana”—which follows, from the previous page, “A search ensued for the loose word, that if pulled out, would cause indescribable destruction”—frame the book’s imaginative linguistic dives.

To trace language is, of course, to trace world histories of colonization and globalization. Ancarrow’s Babel encompasses, but is not limited to, Mansi, Latin, Old English, Tagalog, Inuktitut, Dharawal, Mandarin, Arabic, Middle Persian, and Italian. An exploration of the Latin diabolus and its linguistic permutations ends:

“They speak in tongues,” said the monoglot Evangelical. “Drive them out of this land.”

Language is also sometimes funny, and Ancarrow doesn’t forget that:

Pumpernickel from German pumpern, to ‘pass gas,’ and Nicek, ‘goblin,’ for its unpalatable properties—fart goblin, ass kraken, Puck of petarade, ghost of dinners past, bumyip […]

The list goes on. Later, when the speaker invokes: “Brave, tourist, the five boroughs and its legendary center,” the Yiddish beygl’s center “falls out, lost as a void among voids.” The entry for taboo breaks into a list of taboos that is also a rhyming sonnet, and manages to end with “Nantucket.”

Formal play extends to a “[misplaced index]” and dramatic dialogues between such pairs as Harun al-Rashid and a botanist, and Saint Anthony and an artist. At other times, the riffing is lyrical, even when nodding toward the trail turned cold, as with body, which “begins with lips parting and an exhalation of breath” and “ends in why.” The poet’s linguistic doubling gets the last word in the entry for body, with the ubiquitous “otherwise of obscure origin.”