say 'goodbye' but pause a sec before saying 'chow

Thomas M. Prymak “Pause a Sec”

1 | P a g e This paper is an extension and further elaboration of an article with a similar title that appeared in

The Ukrainian Weekly (Jersey City), no. 26-27, June 28-July 5, 2015.

SAY “GOODBYE,” BUT PAUSE A SEC

BEFORE SAYING “CHOW!”

Thomas M. Prymak

University of Toronto

During the 1960s, when I was a young undergraduate student in history at St Paul’s

College, a Jesuit school at the University of Manitoba in western Canada, I took a seminar course

in the history of the Crusades in which I had been interested since my youth, when I had read Sir

Walter Scott, Harold Lamb, and other authors, who had painted these medieval events in such

exciting colours: “Iron men and saints, off to liberate Jerusalem! Richard the Lionheart, brave to

the point of foolishness; the victorious Sultan Saladin, noble, and generous to the vanquished!”

However, my instructor in this course, Professor L. A. Desmond, who quickly became aware of

my east European background, did not assign to me a topic on the Crusades to the Holy Land, as

I had expected, but rather on “the Crusade against the Slavs” in the mid-twelfth century, a topic

in which he thought I might be interested because of my ethnic background.

He was mistaken about this, however, for I was not enamoured by what I then believed to

be (perhaps in error) its unspoken but underlying juxtaposition of “western civilization” versus

“eastern barbarism.” I much preferred to work on the history of the Greek-speaking Byzantine

Empire with its great capital at Constantinople, called Tsargrad, “City of the Caesars,” by the

Slavs, and later, Istanbul, “The City,” by the Turks. I thought those sophisticated Byzantines to

have been more than the equal in civilization to the western Europe of the Dark Ages.

Be that as it may, at one point, discussion did turn to the origin of the English name for

an unfree person, a bondsman, or “slave,” as opposed to a half-free person, or “serf,” tied to the

land, but otherwise partly free. (Serfs were much more common than slaves in medieval Europe.)

I was astounded, offended, and incredulous when Professor Desmond informed us that this

ostensibly ancient and accepted English word, “slave,” was not derived originally from Anglo-

Saxon, Latin, or French, as is commonly believed, but rather could be traced through some of

these languages to the ethnic term “Slav,” the name of the predominant family of peoples of

eastern Europe, to which group belong today’s Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Czechs, Serbs, and

many others. These were the people who only a few years before had launched the first artificial

earth satellite, Sputnik, and then put the first man and the first woman into space.

I did not quite know how to answer Professor Desmond’s assertion and put the matter

aside. It did not come up again until several years later when I had already switched my main

interests from the history of medieval Europe to a more modern period, and from the Latin and

Germanic West to the Greek and Slavonic East.

In studying the modern history of the Slavic peoples, particularly the Ukrainians, this

question of the origin of the English word “slave” did not immediately resurface. But over the

years, I learned that there were two predominant forms which the name for these peoples and

their languages took in the history books. Some books referred to these peoples as the “Slavic”

peoples, and to their tongues as the “Slavic” languages; while others, most of them older books,

referred to them as the “Slavonic” peoples, and to their tongues as the “Slavonic” languages. In

the USA, the former was predominant; in England, at least in earlier times, the latter was more

common. In Canada, there was historically a mixture of the two, and when in the 1950s, the




Canadian scholars who worked on Eastern Europe established their professional journal, they

titled it Canadian Slavonic Papers. This quite plainly contrasted to the parallel American

journal, which was titled The Slavic Review.

Of course, none of this explained where the term “Slav” had come from in the first place.

But I later learned that there are two popular theories or “folk etymologies” for this name. The

first, favoured by many of the early leaders, or “national awakeners” of the Slavic peoples in the

nineteenth century, proposed that the Slavs got their name from their word for glory: “slava.”

Thus the Slavic peoples are “the glorious ones.” One can easily see how appealing this

etymology was to those early Slavic awakeners, who wished to raise the prestige and cultural

level of their peoples on the general European scene. The East European “national awakeners”

did not invent this explanation though, for its pedigree goes back at least as far as the

Enlightenment-era English historian Edward Gibbon, who matter-of-factly mentioned it in his

influential book on The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

The second theory, one more favoured by modern philologists, or language specialists,

proposed that this ethno-linguistic group, who variously called themselves “Slaviany” or

“Sloviany” in their own languages, proposed that their name came from their common term for

“word”: “slovo.” That is, the Slaviany or Sloviany are the peoples who have the “word” and can

understand each other. This was contrasted to their neighbours, the Germans, whom they referred

to as the “Nimtsy” or “Nemtsy;” that is, the people who were mute, or “who cannot speak the

word.” In fact, this term in its singular form “Nemets,” in many parts of eastern Europe, where

there once existed some German settlers, became a proper or family name for some of them, and

to this very day, there are Mr Nemetskys, Mr Nimchuks, and Mr and Mrs Nimchenkos scattered

across much of that part of the world, and even a few can be found among the descendents of

Slavic or German immigrants in the Americas. Indeed, the great aircraft-carrier of the American

navy, the USS Nimitz, and the whole class of nuclear-powered vessels that followed it, are

named after a German American admiral, whose ancestors can probably be traced to Eastern

Europe.

Now these theories about the origin of the term “Slav” are all well and good, but they

cannot be absolutely proven one way or the other. The true origins of the name “Slav” are lost in

the mists of time, though current opinion leans towards the latter, Slovo theory, on the matter. By

contrast, however, the explanation of the origin of the English word for an unfree person, or

bondsman, or “slave,” is quite different and can be traced back through written sources to its

very origin in early medieval times, the so-called Dark Ages.

It first appeared in medieval Latin in Germany as the word “sclavus” and was used to

refer to those prisoners-of-war taken among the Slavic peoples and used as slaves in western

Europe. (This word, “sclavus,” was indeed an innovation, for the ancient Latin word for slave

had been “servus.”) The word “sclavus” was used in Germany for a while, but after a couple of

hundred years, the term more or less dropped out of use. It was revived, however, by Italian

slave merchants in the Crimea on the north shore of the Black Sea, who, from the 1200s on,

shipped people captured by the Mongols or “Tatars” in the Ukrainian Steppe region, across the

Mediterranean to Italy and North Africa. (This Black Sea Slave Trade, as it is called, was, in fact,

a very big business in its time.) From medieval Latin, the word entered French as “esclave,”

German as “Sklave,” and finally English as “slave.” So, it turned out, Professor Desmond knew

exactly what he was talking about.

But the story does not end there. In Italy, the medieval Latin word “sclavus” eventually

became the Italian “schiavo.” Before modern times, it was considered polite to use this word in




the phrase “I am your slave!” (sono vestro schiavo) when greeting, hosting, or saying farewell to

someone. Eventually, this contracted into “ciao” (or “chow” as it may be spelled in English) and

spread all over southern Europe. I first heard it extensively used when I visited Spain in 1969 as

a young university student and hitchhiker. Today it is known all over the western world.

Of course, the origin of the expression “ciao” is little-known in the English-speaking

world and has also been largely forgotten in Italy itself. This completely contrasts to a number of

other words, clearly ethnic slurs, that were once quite widely spread in North America. I shall

mention only three: “Polak,” “honky,” and “bugger.” All three of these, somewhat like the term

“slave” itself, originate as pejorative or demeaning terms for various peoples of eastern Europe.

The first is quite obvious, for it is simply the Polish name for a Polish person in the

Polish and other Slavonic languages. It only became a pejorative in North America at the end of

the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century when large numbers of Polish and

other Slavic immigrants were pouring into the United States and Canada as part of the Great

Economic Immigration of that time, and the working-class rivals of these newcomers began for

the first time to use the term with a certain amount of undisguised distain. Witness Stanley

Kowalski’s discomfiture with it in the Tennessee Williams play, A Streetcar Named Desire! The

term had been unknown in the English language before the 1880s, when Polish newcomers had

been mostly political émigrés of gentry or aristocratic background.

The origin of second term, “honky,” is less well-known. But it too has a long story

behind it. That term too can be traced back to the Great Economic Immigration, when

immigrants from the Habsburg Monarchy, that is, Austria, Bohemia, Galicia, and Hungary, were

disrespectfully called “bohunks,” a clear conflation of the terms “Bohemian” and “Hungarian.”

Eventually, this term was reduced to “hunky,” and then sometime later, when these immigrants

became rivals for jobs and other benefits with African Americans, the latter, with their own

special intonation, turned it into “honky.” Today, of course, the table has turned, and the new

term of less certain etymology, a phrase actually, “a real hunk,” is used by some women to refer

to a good-looking young male.

The last term, “bugger,” requires an even further venture into history. It comes to English

via the French “bougre” or “bogre.” That term first appeared in the French language in the

twelfth century, when a medieval dualist heresy called Catharism became widespread in the

Languedoc, that is, in southern France, and was ferociously stamped out by Crusaders from the

North. This heresy had been first imported into France from the Balkan Peninsula, where it had

been known as Bogomilism, a purely Slavonic term, which referred to the “Beloved of God” or

“Pilgrims.” The French, however, would refer to one of its followers as a “Bulgarus,” which was

late or vulgar Latin for a person from Bulgaria. At that time, there were all sorts of wild rumours

about the depraved sexual practices of these little-known and secretive heretics, and the

association eventually stuck, giving us the modern English terms “bugger” and “buggery.”

All three of these terms, of course, are, or originated as, ethnic slurs. And we are

conscious of their negative character. This, however, is not the case with the terms “slave” and

ciao, though many years ago, the American philologist, A. A. Robach, the author of a notable

Dictionary of International Slurs, referred to the word “slave” as “...indeed, the most tragic of all

the slurs.” And so, when I hear the word “chow” today, even when spoken by well-wishers who

are simply imitating the Italian usage, something inside me tightens up, especially when it is

spoken by my fellow Canadians or Americans of Ukrainian, Polish, or other Slavic background,

who are generally unaware of its medieval lineage. I well understand that the people using it




usually want to be either friendly or polite, but still, I cannot completely forget its dark origin,

and I myself use it as little as possible.

say 'goodbye' but pause a sec before saying 'chow

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