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

Beards

The number of hidden beards in the English language is quite bizarre. Bizarre, for example, comes from the Basque word bizar or beard, because when Spanish soldiers arrived in the remote and clean-shaven villages of the Pyrenees, the locals thought that their bizars were bizarre.

The feathers that were stuck into the back of arrows were known by the Romans as the beard, or barbus, which is why arrows are barbs, and that’s ultimately the reason that barbed wire is simply wire that has grown a beard.

Barbus is also the reason that the man who cuts your beard is known as a barber. The ancient Romans liked to be clean-shaven, as beards were considered weird and Greek, so their barbers plied a regular and lucrative trade until the fall of the Roman empire. Italy was overrun by tribesmen who had huge long beards which they never even trimmed. These tribesmen were known as the longa barba, or longbeards, which was eventually shortened to Lombard, which is why a large part of northern Italy is still known as Lombardy.

The Romans by that time had become effete, perhaps through a lack of facial hair, and couldn’t take their opponents on. If they had been more courageous and less shaven, they could have stood beard to beard against their enemies, which would have made them objectionable and rebarbative.

What the Romans needed was a leader like General Ambrose Burnside, who fought for the Union during the American Civil War. General Burnside had vast forests of hair running from his ears and connecting to his leviathan moustache. So extraordinary was his facial foliage that such growths came to be known as burnsides. However, Ambrose Burnside died and was forgotten, and later generations of Americans, reasoning that the hair was on the side of the face, took the name burnside and bizarrely swapped it around to make sideburns.

And it’s not only humans that have beards, nor only animals. Even trees may forget to shave, namely the giant bearded fig of the Caribbean. The bearded fig is also known as the strangler tree and can grow to 50 feet in height. The beards and the height and the strangling are connected, for the tree reproduces by growing higher than its neighbours and then dropping beard-like aerial roots into their unsuspecting branches. The beards wrap themselves around the victim until they reach the ground, where they burrow in and then tighten, strangling the host.

There’s an island in the Caribbean that’s filled with them. The natives used to call it the Red Land with White Teeth, but the Spanish explorers who discovered it were so impressed with the psychotic and unshaven fig trees that they called it The Bearded Ones, or Barbados.