I always like it when I can combine both the remits of this blog, and Lola Méndez’s Smithsonian Magazine article “The Real Panama Hat” allows me to do so. Obviously it’s about hats, and in fact features a hat I knew nothing about; meanwhile, the third paragraph introduces a slew of plant names equally unfamiliar to me:
The Panama hat is infamously misnamed. The handmade straw headgear actually hails from Ecuador. Construction workers building the Panama Canal wore the hats, though, as their wide brims protected them from the harsh hot sun. In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt inspected the construction of the canal in a white linen suit topped off with one of the Ecuadorian hats. Photos of Roosevelt unintentionally launched a fashion trend, and the name stuck.
The real Panama hat is the sombrero pintando (“painted hat”), also known as the pinta’o.
The pinta’o originated in the province of Coclé southwest of Panama City, where the hats are still made today. Like the Panama hat, the pinta’o is also handwoven with natural fibers, but it is defined by intricate dark patterns that are woven throughout the hat. Exquisite artisanship is required to craft the sombrero from the fibers of several local plants—bellota for the white part of the hat, chonta for decoration, chisná for dying fiber, junco to make the ornate tarco stripe, and pita for stitching the hat. The bellota fibers are boiled before being sun-dried for about a week, as the whiter the fiber, the more valuable the hat. After the fiber has dried to the desired shade, it’s woven into braids. To form the hat, braids are wrapped around a wooden block and carefully sewn together by hand. Intricate geometric motifs—straight lines, waves and zig-zags—are formed from bands of chonta fiber dyed with chisná leaves. The design creates the appearance of a “painted hat.”
It is indeed a fine piece of headgear; click the link for photos and history. Alas, I also have to put on my editorial hat and shake a monitory finger: the full phrase is sombrero pintado, as seen here, not “pintando”; pinta’o shows the perfectly normal development of the -ado ending in the spoken language, and in fact the Spanish Wikipedia article is called Sombrero pintao, with not even an apostrophe to mark the missing d. (Thanks, Bonnie!)
Just to complicate things, one of the main locales for making these hats (and the site of un musee de chapeau pinta’o, according to the French Wikipedia) is el distrito de La Pintada.
Coincidence?
Another editing lapse: “dying” should be “dyeing”.
Good catch!
“Pintao” reminds me of the time a coworker of Dominican heritage and I were following a Dominican election. He showed me an article online in which the paper had asked a woman asked about the election, but she had failed to vote. Her response — “Nadie me dijo na de esa jodia eleccione.”
It took me a moment to realize it was a phonetic spelling rather than, um, well, I wasn’t really sure maybe Portuguese.
I liked:
sombrero_de_paja_toquilla
1. Panama hat
paja_toquilla
1. the fiber of the Panama hat palm, Carludovica palmata
I did not know that there is such a thing as Panama hat palm!
“The Panama hat is infamously misnamed.”
It is not misnamed at all. Different speech communities may see the same or almost the same thing from different perspectives. For example, in American English, a certain kind of pastry is called Danish pastry because it was introduced into the United States from Denmark, whereas the Danish ancestor of the American variety is called wienerbrød ‘Viennese bread’ in Danish because it was introducted into Denmark from Vienna.
To imply that the “real English name” of the pastry should be *Viennese bread would be as unjustifiedly prescriptive as claiming that “decimate means only ‘kill one of ten of a group of people’” (= the etymological fallacy).
The name Panama hat is therefore fully acceptable, as is sombrero de Jijipapa (one of its Spanish names), so called because in certain parts of the Spanish-speaking world it was imported from Jipijapa, Ecuador.
The matter of perspective is treated further here: Gold, David L. 2006. “Needed: Studies of Degrees of Toponymical Specificity in Lexemes Having a Geographical Reference, Like Words Meaning ‘Brazil nut’ (in Czech, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Rumanian, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish), ‘French chalk’ (in English and French), and ‘Meissen china’ (in English, French, and German).” Beiträge zur Namenforschung. New series. Vol. 41. No. 4. Pp. 425-428.
They from cycles. What is “Leningrad ice cream” in the city of Moscow is “Moscow ice cream” in Leningrad….
Perhaps inspired by Moscow-Leningrad-Moscow trains. You go to bed at the Leningrad Station (вокзал) in Moscow and wake up at identical Moscow Station in SPb.
(What was different is Lenin’s bust. But they removed it:-()
@drasvi. Is it possible that the names ‘Moscow ice cream’ in St. Petersburg and ‘St. Petersburg ice cream’ in Moscow were chosen to create the impression that the ice cream was imported from the other city and therefore of higher quality than locally produced ice cream?
Hence the irony of fate.
But Moscow ice cream in Germany is now Kyiv ice cream.
whereas the Danish ancestor of the American variety is called wienerbrød ‘Viennese bread’ in Danish because it was introducted into Denmark from Vienna.
The pastry seems to have disappeared from Vienna though, unless the Danish version is descended from the “Topfengolatsche”, a bready pastry stuffed with “quark”. If the Danish is related to the Topfengolatsche, it, like the croissant, has apparently done much better in its new home.
But Moscow ice cream in Germany is now Kyiv ice cream.
I didn’t even know that this existed, but now I’m annoyed at that facile symbolism.
@vanya
Plundergebäck has many realisations, but this one looks like images I have seen of Danish Danish (but maybe there are also many realisations there).
https://www.oetker.at/at-de/rezepte/r/marillenplunder
@drasvi
Quella che a Napoli e dintorni viene chiamata pizza romana, in altre zone d’Italia, può venire chiamata invece pizza “Napoli” o napoletana,
https://ricette.giallozafferano.it/Pizza-Romana.html
See also: Wiener, Frankfurter.
(The referents seem to have diverged in the US, but not over here.)
Odd. I’ve never seen either in the local Edeka, which is pretty big.
Ha!
@PP, if you ask me, the only real wienerbrød is the puff pastry kind, i.e., folded over butter and rolled out repeatedly. Like in that recipe, indeed. Some bakers here pretend ignorance and sell stuff that’s basically just a sweet yeast-risen bread.
Also following that pizza recipe will give you 10g of salt per pizza. Discuss.
They form cycles.
A popular Russian urban legend is that rollercoasters, which are known as “American mountains” (американские горки) in Russia, are supposedly known as “Russian mountains” in America.
In fact this is the French name for them (montagnes russes), and while AFAIK one early US version did calque that, it did not catch on there; the chain of transmission went Russia -> France -> USA -> Russia (and elsewhere), with many incremental improvements in France and USA, such that the version that went back to Russia was not very much like the original.
Her response — “Nadie me dijo na de esa jodia eleccione.”
Not trying to nitpick—well, maybe just a little—but did the newspaper omit an
accent in jodía, or did she really say JO dia for jodida?
Jodía for jodida follows the same pattern as pintado>pintao.
For another example of this fairly common transformation,
listen to the popular song Te conozco bacalao, aunque venga dizfrazao.
A popular Russian urban legend is that rollercoasters, which are known as “American mountains” (американские горки) in Russia, are supposedly known as “Russian mountains” in America.
We discussed this back in 2010.
Cuchuflete – definitely “jo-DI-a”. I just don’t know how to make accent marks with the keyboard. Sorry for the confusion.
For acute accent, use & Vacute ;, where V stands for any vowel (and of course you have to close up the spaces); thus & iacute ; gives í.
Then there’s the joke involving hypercorrection whose punchline is, “Pues, en Bilbado comemos bacalado.”
>use & Vacute
Inside hypertext symbols? Or how? The various ways I’ve just tried don’t work.
Pintade in French means guinea fowl. I wonder if there is a connection with the hat, or is it just a painted chicken?
Also following that pizza recipe will give you 10g of salt per pizza. Discuss.
Without counting the anchovies! And Giallo Zafferano recipes should sometimes be taken with a pinch of salt, har de har.
In Central and Northern Italy, pizza romana and pizza napoletana (when referring to toppings, because they can also mean a general style of pizza) are nearly interchangeable terms, although the latter is more common. Sometimes you’ll find both on the menu; in that case romana is usually with capers in addition to the cheese and anchovies, and napoletana without.
Ryan: I think you’re forgetting to put the ‘;’ on the end?
& a acute ;
take out the spaces
á
Ryan: I think you’re forgetting to put the ‘;’ on the end?
Exactly. Try it, you’ll like it.
Thánks.
In the old days, browsers (or HTML parsers in general) would not insist on the semicolon if the end of the entity name was otherwise unambiguous. (If whitespace followed, for instance. IIRC, it was up to the implementer how aggressive the approach to “repair” should be, so things that worked in one browser would just eat a part of a word and disappear in another). Now it plain doesn’t work without the semicolon which discourages people from second guessing the implementation and saves the world from imminent destruction several times per millisecond.
Of course Ryan does not need to know this, only old codgers that feel entitled to leave them out.
(JC will now correct my math).
The bellota in this article is apparently Carludovica palmata, also mentioned in the thread above (also going by various other name toquilla, bombonaje, iraca, soyacal, etc., etc., in Spanish according to region; mediocre map here). I wonder if this local name bellota, literally ‘acorn’ (also, ‘glans penis’), is in reference to the appearance of the mature fruits as the spadix opens up to reveal them, as seen for example here and here.
(Of the other words in that series, chisná is apparently Fridericia chica. The name is doubtless from an indigenous American language, but I have not been able to discover anything more precise that that. Chonta is Astrocaryum standleyanum (chumba wumba!?!) and the word apparently comes from the Quechua name, chunta, for this species. Junco ‘rush’ in this context is apparently the Eleocharis species mentioned later in the article. Pita in this context is apparently Aechmea magdalenae. Etymological summary for this word here.)
Excellent sleuthing, as always!
I am still wondering where the word chisná came from… I just searched around as much as I could for the word for Fridericia chica among the languages of the Chibchan and Chocoan families, but I couldn’t find anything that looked similar on the surface.
Ngäbere (Chibchan, of Panama) kokra tain.
Paya (Chibchan, of Honduras) mã̀sípàhká.
Emberá (Chocoan, of Panama) pucham (Cf. Colombian Spanish puchicama and puchama.
Perhaps a word from the lost Cueva language?
(The specific epithet chica is of indigenous origin too, apparently; see the A. Bonpland Plantes équinoxiales (1805–1817), vol. 1, p. 109, first paragraph, here.)
There’s a Chisná river in Guatemala (= Chisnaj, Chixná), apparently a Mayan name. The plant does reach this far north, but I can’t see how a Mayan name would end up in Panama.
@Sashura “Pintade in French means guinea fowl. I wonder if there is a connection with the hat, or is it just a painted chicken?”
The latter possibility is the right one: see the section headed “Étymol. et Hist.” here:
https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/pintade