Yesterday I made good headway in Spanish Word Histories and Mysteries: thirteen words, many of which will be useful grist for the mill of my next book. I’ve titled this post “Much ‑ado about nothing” because the -ado or -ada endings of three of these words — armada, bastinado (from Spanish bastonada), and avocado — make them look like Spanish past participles, but two of them are faking it.
A grammatical aside: a “past participle” is a verb form like cerrado ‘closed’ in the sentence He cerrado la puerta ‘I have closed the door’. A participle can also be used as an adjective, as in La puerta está cerrada ‘The door is closed”, in which case it must agree with the noun it modifies (puerta is feminine and singular). Compare libros cerrados ‘closed books’, where noun and adjective are both masculine and plural.
- Armada did, in fact, originate as a past participle, although it is obviously a noun. It means ‘navy’, and in English it normally refers to the famous Spanish Armada, the enormous fleet of Spanish ships that in 1588 attempted to spearhead an invasion of England, but lost decisively. (An English “counter-armada” against Spain the next year, led by Sir Francis Drake, failed as well.) Armada is the feminine form of the past participle of the verb -armar ‘to arm’, and therefore means ‘armed’. In Spanish one often sees it in the phrase fuerza armada ‘armed force’ or its plural, fuerzas armadas ‘armed forces’.
I was curious to know why the noun armada is feminine. Is this because of its frequent usage as a feminine adjective, as shown above? The answer turns out to be “sort of.” The direct antecedent of armada was the feminine plural form of the LATIN past participle armatus, found commonly in naves armatae ‘armed ships’. So: feminine by association, yes — but in Latin, not Spanish. - English bastinado has a few related meanings. It can refer to beating someone with a stick, a single blow with a stick, or a stick used for beating people. It is based on the Spanish word bastonada, which appears to be another feminine-past-participle-turned-noun, this one based on a verb bastonar. However, this verb doesn’t exist, and never did. Rather, bastonada was formed from the noun bastón ‘stick’ (related to the French word baton) plus the suffix -ada, which Spanish uses to derive nouns that describe physical violence. A cabezada (from cabeza ‘head’) is a header in soccer or a headbutt in a fight. A cuchillada (from cuchillo ‘knife’) is the cut that a knife makes: a stab or a slash. A puñada (from puño ‘fist’) is a punch. And so on.
Someone who doesn’t know Spanish might be surprised to learn that it has such a specific suffix. For me, the surprise was learning that it has two. I already knew about its -azo suffix, which has the same meaning but is more productive, in the linguistic sense of being freely applied to almost any noun of the speaker’s choice. The Real Academia (previous link) comments that because of this productivity, los diccionarios no puedan recoger todas las voces admisibles así formadas — that is, dictionaries cannot possibly include all the words of this type. For example, if you hit someone with an elephant, this would be an elefantazo.
In fact, three out of the four -ada ‘blow’ words above have more common -azo cousins: bastonazo, cabezazo, and puñetazo. Only cuchillada beats its cuchillazo alternative, although when we talk specifically about navajas (pocket knives) navajazo is more common than navajada. - Finally, the English word avocado looks like another noun based on a past participle. However, it comes instead from the Spanish word aguacate, borrowed from Nahuatl ahuacatl. The -tl consonant cluster, seen also at the end of the language name itself, was difficult for Spanish speakers to pronounce, and changing it to -te was a common solution. Thus tomate, the Spanish word for tomato, comes from Nahuatl tomatl.
Why did English adapt aguacate as avocado? According to Histories and Mysteries, avocado was a variant form used by Spanish speakers before aguacate emerged as the standard. Elsewhere this variant form is attributed to ‘folk etymology’, i.e. the word form being assimilated to a similar pre-existing word, in this case abogado ‘lawyer’. In French, ‘avocado’ and ‘lawyer’ ended up identically, as avocat.
All this was familiar to me before I read the avocado entry in Histories and Mysteries. But I was happy to learn that guacamole comes from the Nahuatl word ahuacamolli, literally ‘avocado sauce’. The second part of the word, molli ‘sauce’, is the source of the culinary term mole (the Mexican sauce). I have to confess that for decades I pronounced this word moLÉ, to rhyme with the exclamation ¡Olé!. This certainly captures how I feel when I eat chicken with mole sauce.