A Taxi by Any Other Name

By Patricia Winton

In 1971, a grad school classmate showed me an ad for The Book of the Month Club which offered the new Compact Edition of The Oxford English Dictionary as a low-cost premium for joining. She made the case that signing up for a trial period was worth the price to get the OED, even if I spent my enrollment purchases on seedy romances. And she was right.

At the time the OED was a thirteen-volume work, condensed in the concise version to two large volumes, reduced to very fine print. The set came with a slip case for the two volumes and a little drawer above for the magnifying glass required for reading it. It sat on my shelf for thirty years until I sold it on eBay before moving to Italy in 2002.

I miss it. I loved to search for the first published use of an English word and be taken on a journey through English prose. Even more fun, I loved to open to a random page and put my finger on an entry to learn about a word.

My enthusiasm for this exercise sometimes came to a sad end. I once took the set to a class I was teaching at Virginia Tech and tried to get my students to share my enthusiasm. It was a dismal defeat. They were bored. The entry I showed them was for “taxi.” They yawned. I hope you’ll find it more interesting.

The original term for what we today call a taxi or a cab was taximeter cabriolet. The cabriolet half is from the French cabriole, which in the 19th century, meant to caper or jump like a young goat, from the Latin capri. The term identified a two-wheeled, horse-drawn carriage that tended to careen left and right as it traveled, reminding people of a baby goat at play. 

Today, in French, cabriolet can mean convertible (as in the car), perhaps because the original cabriolet carriage had a folding leather hood that could be raised over the two occupants to protect them from the rain or pushed back to expose them to the wind and sun. The cabriolet also had a leather lap robe to protect the occupants from mud splatters.

The taximeter part of the term comes from the German taxe, meaning a charge or a measure of costs. Invented by Wilhelm Bruhn in 1891, the taximeter originally clung to the wheel on the driver’s side, counting the revolutions.

Wilhelm Bruhn

The cabriolet carriage first entered England in 1823 before the invention of the taximeter. The English immediately shortened the name to cab. When the meters came across the Channel, the taximeter cabriolet became taxi cab. Now we say, “taxi” or “cab,” but rarely both.

I’ve had a few bouncing cab rides, lurching through city streets as I imagine the original cabriolet did. But they have reminded me less of a goat at play and more like a charging bull.

Visit me at ItalianIntrigues.blogspot.com where I write on alternate Thursday about all things Italian.

Unique Word, Common Problem

By Supriya Savkoor

Every now and then, I learn a new word that I wonder how I couldn’t have known before. The one I learned most recently was completely new to me, despite it describing a common phenomenon in a great many modern cultures.

In fact, the word irredentism itself is fairly modern. It comes from the Italian word irrendentismo, meaning “unredeemed,” and originally refers to a popular movement to unify all Italian-speaking people within a national identity. The movement unofficially began when France annexed the then-Italian island of Corsica in 1768, followed soon after by Napoleon’s annexation of Tuscany, Piedmont, and Liguria. The Kingdom of Italy considered any community in which Italians, or a majority of a population speaking Italian, a part of this “unredeemed Italy,” and made it its mission to unify Italians, a movement that took off in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

The term came into use in 1866, when the Kingdom of Italy fought its third war of independence against the Austrian Empire and won back Venezia (Venice). Three years later, it achieved the milestone win of Rome itself, where the papacy had reigned supreme for more than a thousand years.

Irredentism was the main reason Italy entered World War I, after which it reclaimed several more important territories, including Trieste and Istria. Fascist Italy in World War II began annexing even areas in which Italians were only a minority, and after the war, the movement slowed down altogether.

By then, the idea of nationalism was catching on big elsewhere, with unification movements springing up across Europe along linguistic, cultural, and ethnic lines. Nationalist movements and ethnic uprisings began challenging and ultimately breaking up the powers of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires, leading to the independence of many “majority” linguistic groups we now know as Greece, Serbia, Moldova, Bulgaria, Poland, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Slovakia, Ukrainia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Cyprus, Egypt, Sudan, Armenia, Libya, Syria, Israel, Lebanon, and Turkey. These cultures formed national identities around their native tongue, including historic, folkloric, and literary traditions, and ultimately, around their common political aspirations.

Irrendentism plays a role in much of the world’s modern political challenges. When colonial powers redrew borders in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, many of the resultant states were unhappy by the artificially imposed national borders, conflicting historical claims, and ethnic groups splitting up between countries (such as the Pashtuns between Afghanistan and Pakistan and the Yorubas between Nigeria and Benin).

An area claimed by more than one group is also considered irredentism, and no surprise, you’re already familiar with a bunch of them. China’s claim over Taiwan. The “tug of war” between Israel and the Palestinian National Authority over the West Bank and Gaza. India and Pakistan’s equal claims (and multiple wars) over Kashmir. Argentina’s longstanding claim over the Falkland Islands. The 2008 claim of independence by Kosovo. Greece’s claim over the name “Macedonia.” The now-resolved issue of Northern Ireland between the UK and Ireland.

The word appears in lots of white papers and policy briefs, along with such words as “nationalism” or even “revisionism.” And, of course, in the media. Surely now, you’ll see it more often, as I have. Such a big part of our world today, yet now that I know the precise word for it, it feels sadder somehow, perhaps a kind of proof that we’re trending toward splintering off rather than coming together?

Who knows. But as you contemplate my "new word" discovery, any words that surprised you or made you view the world a little differently? Do share.

From "Hashish-Eater" to Assassin

Alamut fortification in Iran
Photo by Payampak

By Heidi Noroozy

In 1930, British explorer and travel writer, Freya Stark, undertook an unusual journey across Persia, from the western province of Lurestan to the Caspian Sea. Her travels took her through a remote and as yet unmapped region of the Alborz Mountains called the Alamut Valley, better known to Westerners as the Valley of the Assassins.

Nearly 900 years before Freya Stark’s expedition, Alamut was home to a heretical sect of Shia mystics called the Nizari Ismailis. Their leader, Hassan-i Sabbah, captured Alamut Castle in 1090 and eventually expanded his territory to include 50 fortresses tucked away among the remote mountain peaks.

The Nizaris were a small band of men and their families surrounded by hostile enemies, and Hassan developed a strategy for dealing with threats to his power without sacrificing too many of his own soldiers. He would order them to kill enemy leaders, both political and religious, using stealth, cunning, and ruthlessness. Daggers were the murder weapons of choice, and often the Nizaris would leave a knife on the pillow of a sleeping target as a warning. This band of militant fanatics is long gone now (though the form of Islam that they followed is still practiced in parts of the Middle East and Central Asia), but they’ve left behind a chilling legacy: the word “assassin.”

Linguists disagree on how the term, “assassin,” came into English and other European languages, although most scholars attribute the word’s origin to the Nizari Ismailis, aka the Alamut Assassins. One theory comes from an account by Marco Polo, who visited Alamut in the 13^th century, not long after the sect and their stronghold were destroyed by Mongol invaders.

Castles in Alamut & Rudbar regions, Iran
Photo by Jolle

In his account of the trip, Marco Polo described a ritual in which Hassan-i Sabbah would give his young followers a drink laced with hashish that put them to sleep. He’d then place them in a beautiful garden filled with lovely maidens and wake them up, telling them they were in paradise. Later, when he sent them out on a mission, he’d promise them that if they were successful they’d return to paradise. According to legend, this practice earned the Assassins the nickname, hashishiyyeen, an Arab term meaning “hashish-eater.”

The problem with this theory is that neither Ismaeli nor other Muslim texts offer any evidence that the Assassins ever took hashish, a drug made from the resin of the cannabis plant and not usually administered in liquid form. Marco Polo’s account may have been influenced by the reports of Crusader chroniclers, who encountered the Ismailis on their holy wars. In any case, it’s unlikely that the explorer ever met any Assassins since their stronghold had been destroyed in 1256, when he was only two years old (and 132 years after Hassan-i Sabbeh’s death) .

Another theory is that the Arabic term, “hashish-eater,” had a different, more figurative connotation at the time. It meant “outlaw,” or “disreputable person,” and was likely applied to the Assassins by their enemies and not by the Nizaris themseves.

Hassan and his men called themselves the “asasayoon,” or “followers of the foundation (asas) of faith,” which leads to the third theory, that “assassin” derives from this word.

Siege of Alamut
Persian Miniature

Although this etymology sounds plausible, my money is still on “hashishiyyeen” in the figurative sense as the origin of the word. Usually it’s the victors who write the final chapter of any history, and it makes sense that the Alamut Assassins’ enemies would continue to call them outlaws decades or even centuries after they met their end.

Whatever the real origin of the word, “assassin” entered European languages during the Middle Ages. The Crusaders were frequent targets of Nizari attacks, including Conrad of Montferrat, who was assassinated shortly before being crowned King of Jerusalem. The first Western texts to document the use of the term are the chronicles of these holy wars.

Today, all that’s left of the Alamut Assassins are their crumbling fortresses, a tangle of legends, and a word that still chills the heart.