You may recall, from the learning revealed at the end of my last word tasting note, that, at least once in the 1580s, abstruse was used for ostrich (“many Abstruses in the Plaines,” the Oxford English Dictionary quotes). You may have noted then that I didn’t remark on how that could have happened. Was it through some arcane process? Or perhaps an ill-consumed cocktail of absinthe and Chartreuse? (Definitely not that; neither liquor existed in 1580.)
In truth, it’s fairly straightforward, which is a blessing in bird names. Some birds, yes, are named clearly enough – after the sound they make (chickadee), what they eat (flycatcher), where they are wrongly presumed to be from (turkey – which in French is dinde, from d’Inde, ‘of India’, and in other languages is named after Guinea, Peru, and even the city of Calicut), and sometimes what they look like. Others should be named one of those ways. The Canada goose, for instance, is sometimes affectionately called the cobra chicken by Canadians, for reasons that are obvious if you’ve ever surprised one on a footpath.
In the case of the abstruse naming of the ostrich, the quotation is from an English translation of a book about the “discovery and conquest” of Peru (by a bunch of turkeys, so to speak). Here is the full line as given by the OED: “In certaine places of Chili, were many Abstruses in the Plaines.” The author is, in fact, not even talking about real ostriches; the birds he saw were rheas. But the original author was writing in Spanish, and the Spanish word for ostrich is avestruz.
Yes. If you know that v and b are phonologically interchangeable in Spanish, you can see that avestruz is within a pinfeather of abstruse. That’s rather straightforward, isn’t it?
So then we need only wonder where this word avestruz comes from. We will note right away that it seems related to the French word for the same bird, autruche. And we will further note that autruche is within a pinfeather of Autriche, which is the French name for Austria. Could it be that this African bird was, like the turkey, named after a country it had nothing to do with?
Nope. Pure coincidence. Sorry. Autruche and avestruz both come by meandering pathways from Latin avis struthio – where avis means ‘bird’ and struthio means ‘ostrich’. Struth! I don’t know why they needed to respecify “bird,” but there you have it. (As to English ostrich, by the way, it is from the same root, but by way of Old French.)
OK, so where does struthio come from? It’s a Latinization of Greek στρουθίων strouthíōn. Which also means ‘ostrich’, but it’s a shortened form of the full name: στρουθοκάμηλος strouthokámēlos. I mean, I can see why they’d shorten it a bit, can’t you? It’s rather long-necked as it is.
Speaking of which: στρουθοκάμηλος is a compound. It’s made from στρουθός strouthós, ‘sparrow’ and κάμηλος kámēlos, ‘camel’. Why is it called that? For the same reason we call a Canada goose a cobra chicken. Camels have long necks, you see. And I guess somehow the sparrow was the particular bird that came to mind. I can’t say I see why. But maybe it was sarcasm. Or imprecision about scale. Or maybe it’s that it’s not a camel sparrow, it’s a sparrow camel: camel with sparrow mods, rather than the converse.
So. The ostrich was once called the abstruse for what turns out to be simultaneously the most and least recondite reason imaginable. Is that a stretch? Well, don’t say I never stuck my neck out for you.
Sesquiotica 