I often confused entomology with etymology in my misspent youth, when I was more interested in bugs than words anyhow, writes Anthony Galvin.
Silverfish, grasshoppers, cockroaches and - best of all - fireflies. In time, however, the origins of words began to offer their own fascination. Like gerrymander, for instance, which owes itself to a certain Governor Gerry, whose skills at rearranging constituencies in Massachusetts in 1812 eventually, à la Captain Boycott, enriched the English language.
There was also the anonymous, albeit enterprising, French factory worker who, during an industrial dispute, surreptitiously inserted his hard wooden shoe - or sabot - into vital cogs and wheels, bringing production to a grinding, splintering halt, and the word sabotage into the language.
Consider, also, "moly" (as in "Holy Moly me, my father loves Nikita Kruschev" - that inspired lyric from Tommy Makem some years back), which traces itself back to the magical - and in that sense, holy - herb called moly, which Hermes gave Odysseus as a counter-charm against the seductive sorceress, Circe.
My personal etymological favourite, however, is "cocktail" - not in its secondary meaning of "a non-thoroughbred racehorse", but rather in its far more popular use for "a mixed drink". Better yet, my authority for the coining of "cocktail" is not the unabridged OED or Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, but rather personal field work that I carried out on a trip south of the Border into Mexico over 20 years ago.
The story begins when I found myself unable to book a seat on the bus from the port city of Vera Cruz to Merida, a small town 700 miles away on the Yucatan peninsula. Reduced to hitch-hiking, I stuck out my thumb and was shortly lifted by Mario, a shirt salesman, travelling with his two cousins, Rafael and Alberto. Our transport was a battered 1967 Dodge with a gaping hole in the dash where the radio once blared, and a horn which just about still worked whenever Mario managed to make contact between a loose wire and a metal bolt at the centre of the steering wheel.
The mountains south of Vera Cruz were shrouded in mist as we drove along under a darkly menacing sky, not unlike many a summer's day I'd spend in years to come in Donegal. Several hours and several showers later, we pulled off the highway on to a dirt road which led to a small, palm-thatched shack, behind which sat an even smaller shed which served as a kind of Mexican shebeen. Spilling out of the Dodge, we proceeded to sample the dubious delights of Mexican poitín, or rather home-brewed aguardiente. It tasted something like battery fluid as we sucked it from sticks of raw sugar cane that had been soaking in the stuff, and improved to something more like paint thinner when we mixed it with Pepsi-Cola and lime - a cocktail of sorts, but not the cocktail that I'm on about.
After spending that night at Villahermosa, roughly midway between Vera Cruz and Merida, we set off the next morning, stopping for lunch at the town of Escarcega where I carelessly swallowed a chilli pepper, hidden in my salty string beef mixed with egg, that set my oesophagus afire. Later that afternoon, we paused for the Yucatan equivalent of a quick pint at the seaside town of Campeche, choosing a cantina with saloon-style swinging doors, situated on a street-corner within sight of the ocean.
One of the joys of ordering a beer in Mexico, as in Spain, are the plates of tapas - or more properly botanas - that accompany the icy bottles. That afternoon alone I sampled octopus, abalone, snails, shrimp, crab, avocado, cucumbers in hot sauce, and a dip of squash seeds ground up with more chillis.
During our refreshments, I remarked upon the ancient wall along the seafront that I could see from my seat. In turn, our driver, Mario, told me how the wall had been built during the 17th century to repel the Gulf of Mexico pirates who were given to sacking Campeche. According to Mario, a favourite pastime of the buccaneers was to raid the local cantinas, where after gathering various bottles of liqueurs, the pirates would pour their contents into a single glass. The resultant concoction, with its assorted streaks of colour, was dubbed cola de gallo - "the tail of a cock" - after the rainbow effect we've all seen in a rooster's tail-feathers.
It took a moment or two for the penny to drop, given the refreshments and the medium of Spanish, but drop it did, much to my delight. Wasting no time, I proceeded to tell my company how cola de gallo, a combination of spirits, "the tail of a cock", had entered the English language as just that: "a cocktail".
Language, however, is a living thing, and as we prepared to depart once more for Merida, I spied on the cantina menu coctel de camerones - that is, "shrimp cocktail". "Coctel" is, of course, spurious Spanish for "cocktail", itself translated from the Spanish cola de gallo - which, for all I know, was itself coined, some 300 years before, in the very cantina where we sat.