Word Stories: barbecue

Steve Taylore-Knowles looks at the stories behind the English language.

On a recent research trip to Mexico, I was taken to a road-side place for lunch, one of a number that line the route up into the mountains around Mexico City. The simple wooden structure was decorated with bright paper streamers and the women came to meet the car, clapping loudly to attract us to their establishment, rather than next door, whose second-rate clapping presumably reflected on their food. We took our place at a table under an awning and I noticed a large hand-painted sign proclaiming that they offered barbacoa. What exactly was the connection, I wondered to myself as I munched on quesadillas and fried cactus, between that and barbecue?

The answer lies in Haiti, formerly known as Hispaniola. When Christopher Columbus arrived there in December 1492, it was already inhabited (a fact that, naturally, didn’t prevent him from claiming the island for Spain and putting his brother, Bartholomew, in charge). The indigenous people referred to themselves as Taino (‘good’ or ‘noble’) and were spread over the Bahamas and the Greater and Lesser Antilles. These people made frames of wooden sticks raised up on poles, both for sleeping on and for cooking meat over a fire. Their name for this wooden frame was a barbacoa and the term was adopted into Spanish and then into English.

The word soon came to acquire its modern meaning, defined by the OED as ‘a large social entertainment, usually in the open air, at which animals are roasted whole, and other provisions liberally supplied’. How liberally can be seen from a quote of 1884 from the Boston Journal, which reported that ‘at the Brooklyn barbecue, which Governor Cleveland recently attended, 5000 kegs of beer were dispensed’.

The language of the Tainos (Arawak) has bequeathed a few other words to English, coming via Spanish. From hamaca we get hammock (which has got to be more comfortable than sleeping on a barbacoa). I’m sure you can also guess which words we get from the Arawak words canoa, huracan, tobaco, and batata.