Forever Anbar, or is that maybe ambergris?

A friend’s question about possible connections between a couple of sound-alike words serves as a reminder that with words, just as with people, some that appear closely related, aren’t, and others that don’t, are.

|
Gordon Lubold/The Christian Science Monitor/File
A shopkeeper displays plastic chairs in front of his shop in dowtown Fallujah, Iraq, in the country's Anbar province.

A friend asks: Why do “Amarillo,” as in Texas, and “amaryllis,” as in those bulbs in a box at the supermarket this time of year, have a “commonality of sounds?” Are they related?

The short answer is no. But the longer answer is more interesting. I’ve been thinking about the current Henry Louis Gates Jr. celebrity-genealogy TV series, “Finding Your Roots.” My big takeaway from genealogical research is that Everyone Is Related to Everyone Else. An important secondary message, though, is that some things that appear closely related, aren’t, and other things that don’t, are. 

Before it was the name of a group of plants, Amaryllis was a feminine given name, “of a country-girl in Theocritus, Ovid, and Virgil,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. (“Yes, of course, Theocritus,” I hear you murmuring, Dear Reader.) The great Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707-78), needing a name for a particular “genus of autumn-flowering bulbous plants,” to quote the OED further, evidently just plucked “Amaryllis” from classical literature and pressed it into service.

The letter “y” often points to Greek roots. The illo suffix in amarillo, though, is simply a standard Spanish diminutive.

An armadillo, thus, is literally “a little armored thing.” One accounting for amarillo is that it means “a bit of bitterness.”

The Online Etymology Dictionary explains amarillo as a “name given to several species of American trees, from Spanish, from Arabic anbari ‘yellow, amber-colored,’ from anbar, ‘amber.’   ”

Amarillo, the city, the dictionary surmises, “may be so called from the color of the banks of a nearby stream.” But is there a connection to Anbar Province in Iraq?

Amber came into English, from Arabic in the mid-14th century to mean what we now call ambergris, or perfume made therefrom. The dictionary explains ambergris as “a wax-like substance of ashy colour, found floating in tropical seas, a morbid secretion from the intestines of the sperm-whale. Used in perfumery, and formerly in cookery.” Yum.

The dictionary adds, “In Europe, the sense was extended, inexplicably, to fossil resins from the Baltic ... which has become the main sense as the use of ambergris has waned.” 

These resins are the hard orange-yellow substance used in jewelry. Ambergris came into use to distinguish whales’ “gray amber” from jewelers’ “yellow amber.”

“Forever Amber” was a racy historical novel, set in the 17th century and published in 1944. Scandalous in its day, it nonetheless led to many girls’ being named “Amber” after its title character. “Anbar” is a Muslim girl’s name, meaning “perfume” or “ambergris.”

Anbar Province in Iraq, though, gets its name from a similar-looking but different Persian word that, according to the Tourism in Iraq website, means “granaries.”

By the time you read this, Professor Gates may have shown how the actress Julianne Moore is related to, who knows, Muhammad Ali or Mahatma Gandhi. As with people, so with words: There are connections – just not always as you’d expect.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Forever Anbar, or is that maybe ambergris?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Verbal-Energy/2016/0121/Forever-Anbar-or-is-that-maybe-ambergris
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe