06.10.08

Right on, Q!

Posted in French sources, myths and misconceptions, spelling, word history at 5:53 am by Bill Brohaugh

When Father’s Day approaches, the ads for grill equipment immediately spring up. Yes—cliches. Man like fire! Man burn stuff!

Which is fine, because I am myself fuel for those cliches. One of my passions is barbecue, and sometimes barbeque. In my book The Grill of Victory, I talk about such spelling variations:

The word barbecue itself is an orthographic challenge. On the back of the Gwatney Championship Barbecue team rig [the cooking gear of one of the competing teams] are painted the words “Bar be cue Made Simple.” The food may be made simple, but the spelling isn’t. There’s no way to misspell the word barbecue unless maybe you throw a Z or an ampersand into it. So many ways to spell the word that started out as barbacoa [from Spanish in the Caribbean]. There’s barbecue, barbeque, bar b q, bar b cue, bubbacue (actually a team name), BBQ, B B Q, barbicu (in pre-Revolutionary War writings), barbacue (same). Oftentimes today, the cooking is called Que for short, and Q for shorter. And the shortest version of the word, the letter Q, is visually appropriate. In your mind, rotate it 90 degrees counterclockwise and see the fat little piggy and its tail.

I’m not the first to have visualized li’l perky-tail piggy. A few years ago, a famous word-watcher noted that, in fact, the letter Q derived its name from “tail” as a loan word:

Q..The name of the letter is cue, from queue, French, tail; its form being that of an O with a tail.

OK, it was a few centuries ago. That’s Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language. Don’t believe it, even if you see it on the internet. Good guess, Doc Sam, but wrong. As wrong, by the way, as the false etymology of barbecue itself, which itself has some French misconceptions quite in line with the good Dr. Johnson’s. A little more self-serving self-quoting, this time from Everything You Know About English Is Wrong, dispelling the word’s supposed French origins:

Barbe means “beard,” and queue means “tail.” When one cooks a hog whole on a spit, you cook it from “beard to tail,” from barbe a queue. Barbequeue. Granted, there are dishes that are named according to how they’re prepared, such as pot roast, though to follow the pattern of barbe a queue, we’d have to call it something like compléterpourbaserdansunvraifourchaud (from the French meaning “top to bottom in a real hot oven”). But even if we would give such a word creation mechanism any credence, consider two things: 1) Wouldn’t mouseau-a-queue (“snout to tail”) have been a more logical way of expressing the cooking method? 2) Have you ever seen a pig with a beard? Even a French pig? Little goatee, curling handlebar mustache? Soo-oui-oui!?

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