Monday October 11, 2010
Has anyone else ever been driven crazy by some unknown or forgotten piece of knowledge? It could be a forgotten song lyric, book title, or locker combination. It could be a never known personal blood type. The lack of knowledge starts out as an annoyance, progress to irritation, and before you know it you are completely obsessed. When this happens there is nothing to be but surrender to the obsession and go find out the answer.
Yesterday I was reading something on hurricanes and suddenly thought, "I wonder where the word hurricane came from?" I tried to go on reading but my attention had already been derailed by my need to find out the origin of the word hurricane. I surrendered and here is what I learned.
The experts seem to have some disagreement on the issue. Some sources say hurricane is derived from the Carib god, Hurican; while other sources say the word was derived from one of the Mayan creator gods, Hurakan. I am old enough to still give ultimate authority to my old friend The Merriam-Webster Dictionary. This reliable reference traces the hurricane verbal path back to the Spanish huracan which in turn came from the Taino's hurakan. Most experts in this field of study say that the original meaning was simply storm. (To be fair there are also some pretty smart scholars out there who argue that the original meaning was storm god or evil spirit.)
Hurricane is a word which came to English language directly from the Spanish language with no Latin involvement. The first European to document the occurrence of these mighty storms was Christopher Columbus in 1495 while sailing in the West Indies. So now we know all about the origin of the word hurricane. If any of you should win a trivia game with this information I want to know about it.
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