The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Ciao Slave-driver

The word slave comes from Slav, and though it varies between Western languages the poor Slavs were everybody’s original slave. The Dutch got slaaf, the Germans got Sklav, the Spanish got esclavo and the Italians got schiavo.

Medieval Italians were terribly serious fellows. They would wander around solemnly declaring to each other ‘I am your slave’. However, being medieval Italians, what they actually said was Sono vostro schiavo.

Then they got lazy and shortened it to schiavo. In the north, where they were lazier still, this got changed to ciao.

Then, a few centuries later, the Italians got all energetic and tried to join in the Second World War. British and American troops were sent to tick them off.[5] These Allied troops picked up the word ciao and when they got back to their own countries they introduced it into English. It was considered a rather exotic new word. But be wary when you say ciao: however dashing and Mediterranean you may think you’re being, you are, etymologically, declaring your own enslavement.

Ciao has an exact opposite, in the greeting Hey, man. In the United States, before the Civil War had finally established the idea that slavery isn’t completely compatible with the Land of the Free, slave-owners used to call their slaves boy.

The Battle of Gettysburg freed the slaves and produced a memorable address, but it didn’t, unfortunately, come with a socio-economic plan or a new language. Slave-owners weren’t allowed to own slaves any more, but they continued to be rather nasty to their ex-slaves and kept calling them boy in a significant sort of way that annoyed the hell out of the manumitted.

All over America, infuriating white people would address black men with the words ‘Hey, boy’. And it grated. It really grated.

That’s why, in the 1940s, black Americans started taking the fight the other way and greeting each other with the words ‘Hey, man’. The vocative was not inserted for the purposes of sexual identification, it was a reaction against all those years of being called boy.

It worked. White people were so confused by ‘Hey, man’ that the sixties happened and everybody, of whatever race, started calling each other man, until the original significance was lost. This is an example of Progress.

Now, before the next link, are robots Martian slave-owners, Bolivian peasants, or Czech serfs?