Last week’s column was about one of my hobbies, etymology — the tracing of word and phrase origins. One of the words I mentioned was “Hoosegow,” a word for “jail,” which I heard in the cowboy movies of my childhood.

But it wasn’t used only in cowboy movies; apparently, it was used in late 19th and early 20th century in the American Southwest. It was a corruption of a Spanish word, something that happened a lot with loan words. As for its origin? I wrote it came from the Spanish word, “juzgado,” which meant “jug,” a term also used in English for “jail.”

Right after the column came out I got an email from my old pal and fellow buck private in The Trenches of Academe, Kirk Peterson. He said Hoosegow was a corruption of “juzgado,” but that juzgado doesn’t mean “jug.” Instead, it comes from “juzgar,” which means “to judge.” Juzgado is a court proceeding, and since courts and jails were often in the same building (including in My Home Town not all that long ago), the term came to refer to a jail as well. Whew!

And guess what? He was right. And even worse, I was wrong, if you can believe it. And if you can’t, I can.

So how did my train of thought get derailed on this one?

Simple: I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t do any real homework. Instead, years ago I’d read in an obviously unreliable source that juzgado meant jug, and I didn’t check it before I wrote the column.

My head bloody but unbowed, this week I shall once again sail the etymological seas and hope my navigation skills are good enough to prevent me from drifting off-course and breaking up on the shoals of sloppy research.

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The right way, the wrong way and the Navy way

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When I came to the best place to mine for language gems, This Man’s Navy was far and away Numero Uno. And it started from the get-go, with the name “Boot Camp.” So where did that come from? Not from our boots, which were called “Boondockers,” which comes from the Tagalog word “Bundok,” which means “mountain.” It came into American English, as many words have — through military intervention abroad, in this case, the Philippine-American War.

So now that you know what boot camp isn’t named after, I hope you want to know what it IS named after. And here ’tis…

It has nothing to do with boots, though it’s close — spatially speaking. It refers to the white, mid-calf canvas leggings all recruits were issued in boot camp. Essentially, they were spats, but let’s face it — gung-ho young peeps in snappy uniforms and perfectly-aligned formations, marching their way to glory on the drill field. Spats Camp sounds like a mincing get-together of the Adolphe Menjou Fan Club.

As for Navy nomenclature, we were swamped with it from Day One. Rooms were called spaces, walls were called bulkheads, posts were called stanchions. Doors were hatches, stairs were ladders. The bathroom was the head, underwear was skivies.

We had to learn all the different ranks, enlisted and officer. And if that wasn’t bad enough, we had to learn the symbols that designated enlisted men’s ranks (called rates) and job specialties (called ratings). This was mind-boggling because there were so many of them, but luckily both rate and rating were on badges on the uniforms. The ratings were symbols under the eagle (which we called crows) on the badge, and above the stripes, which showed the rate.

Many of the ratings symbols were easy to figure out because the symbols illustrated them. For example, Boatswains Mates (which we wrote as bosuns, and whom we referred to only as “boats”) had a pair of crossed anchors. Gunners Mates had crossed cannons. Personnelmen (who did all the office work) had crossed quills. Boiler Tenders had something that looked like a boiler, with puffs of steam coming out. Radiomen had crossed lightning bolts. Corpsmen had a caduceus — a sure sign of a medical person.

One thing about the different ratings: Almost all of them felt their group was superior to the others. And thus we had condescending, if not downright insulting, names for each other. Bosuns Mates were deck apes; Boiler Mates were snipes. In fact, carrying it to an extreme, my company commander, referring to them by their ratings initials, BT, called them the Barely Trainables. But that was OK because he was an Aviation Bosun’s Mate, who were on aircraft carriers and who the snipes — and every other rating — referred to as effin airdales.

Corpsman (the army equivalent of medics) were without doubt the most universally respected of all the ratings for the simple reason they monitored and maintained our health and could — and did — save our lives. They were rigidly trained and highly skilled and took crap from no one (not that many peeps were dumb enough to give it to them in the first place). Beyond that, they were the medical arm of the Marine Corps and whenever the marines went into combat, they took corpsmen with them. But in typical Navy fashion, no matter how how skilled or how respected the corpsman were, they were still referred to as “chancre mechanics.”

Next, our uniforms. Our work uniform were dungarees, which we called Dungees. Interestingly, dungaree is a word derived from Hindi, “dungri” and I assume it got into English through the Brit occupation of India. Our hats, officially “white hats,” we called Dixie Cups, for obvious reasons. Dress uniform was dress blues, which the Navy being the Navy, was the pinnacle of tradition. The pants had no zipper, but a flap with 13 buttons (symbolizing the original Colonies, of course). They had no pockets, so our wallets were folded over the waistband, our cigarettes were in our socks, and our combs were stashed in the laces in the back of the pants. Our jackets were pea coats, whose name had nothing to do with the legume, but came from the Dutch word for them, Pijjekker, which means a wool jacket.

Oh yeah, if you were a true salty dog like my friend Johnny J, you also had Liberty Cuffs. They were a strip of cloth sewn inside the cuffs, depicting dragons, eagles, mermaids and so on, were beautiful in a garish way, and got their name because they could only be shown on liberty, since according to regs you couldn’t roll up your cuffs while on duty.

Liberty was the army equivalent of a pass, allowing you to go off base. There was Cinderella Liberty, which meant you had to be back on base at midnight (it was also the name of an excellent novel about typical Navy life). But my rave fave was Vampire Liberty. This was if there was a blood drive on base and if you gave blood, you got a half-day off work.

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Something not rotten in …

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Since I began this column referring to a note from one of my fans, I thought it appropriate to end it the same way.

I got an email from Frank Clemmensen, another fellow PSC faculty member from The Glory Days. Frank was a landscape architect and a skilled artist. After he left Old Siwash he took up nature photography and his wildlife photos are truly impressive. And what does that have to do with etymology? Nothing. But thanks for asking.

What DOES have to do with etymology is his email, in which he said, “Since my roots are Danish, I though I’d shoot this one back atcha. Husband, ‘hus’ is house in Danish, ‘bonde’ is a type of farmer in Danish.” He gave his source as Kasper, who for all I know is the Danish version of my childhood comic book charmer, Casper the Friendly Ghost.

Etymology being etymology, Frank was right … as far as he went. Sadly, he didn’t go far enough, because the derivation isn’t quite so simple because etymology is often not simple or straightforward.

While husband indeed came from Danish, it actually is derived from Old Norse, which is the mother tongue of all Germanic languages. In Old Norse the word was Husbondi, whose roots meant House Dweller. Bondi could also mean “tiller of the soil,” but the use of Husband as a farmer came into use later, around 1400. And thus the term Animal Husbandry — something that never made sense to me.

Curiously, the bondi root comes from ON “bua,” to dwell, and is related to of all things, Bondage, since it evolved into Bond and referred to bonded farmers, who were serfs, which is just a nice word for slaves.

And thus it is with etymology: If you have the sources and the spare time, you can follow the origins and evolutions of words to your heart’s content (espesh if you have the heart of a word freak). Oh yeah, my sources for Husband were the OED, Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, and Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, and I used all three to explore the word Husband as far and wide as I could.

As I said, Frank was right with what he had — he just could’ve dug up more. So while he’s a great guy and a great photographer, he’s clearly not a great Dane.