When English Discovered Verbs it Never Knew it Needed
Contemplating Amok, Kowtow, Shampoo and Galvanize
We’re familiar with the global linguistic spread of nouns — after all, why come up with a new word for “a seed of a tropical bush that is heated until it is brown and then crushed to make” a delicious drink when the coffee is already readily available (and readily pronounceable) to fit snugly into the bean shape hole in your language as a brand new noun.
Doing words, it seems, are harder to borrow from exotic sources. Unlike new plants or new foods, it is finding new actions that don’t already have good names — and yet a few common verbs have been found through sufficiently remote cross-cultural contact and scientific discovery.
Amok
Borrowed verbs are rare enough to get their own books. John Spores devotes 179 pages of Running Amok: An Historical Inquiry (1988) to the act of behaving uncontrollably in a violent manner. Technically, there are two types of amok — a reactive and spontaneous amok, and an international amok. In English people (and only ever other people) run amok, they never contemplate amok, and only ever walk amok as a joke.
Amok entered the English language from Malay ‘amuk’, via the Portuguese term ‘amouco’. It subsequently spread to both Germanic and Scandinavian languages. There it met the linguistic legacy of bear (bjǫrn) shirt (serkr) wearing beserkers. Fortunately, the International Journal of Transpersonal Studies exists to help us spot the similarities between running amok and going beserk.
But for English speakers, running amok has always been more popular than going beserk. ‘Amok’ has a longer and more prevalent history compared to ‘berserk’, which only started to appear in print in the 1920s, peaked in the 1980s, and has been dying away. Amok by contrast is, well, continuing to run amok.
To Kowtow
Perhaps the linguistic opposite of running amok is to kowtow, from the Chinese kòutóu 叩头, literally ‘knocking head’. Sir Henry Hoyle Howorth described the kowtow in his 1876 History of the Mongols, from the 9th to the 19th Century:
As soon as he was seated, the officials of the tribunal of the Mongols conducted these princes to a position thirty paces in front of the Imperial platform, when an officer addressed them in Mongol saying, “Kneel down”, upon which they knelt. Then the officer shouted, “Touch the ground with your heads (i.e., make the kowtow). This they did three times (pp480–481).
Kowtow is an interesting case of a verb that the English-speaking world didn’t know it needed until contact with imperial China. The literal translation “knocking heads” was already taken, and meant (figuratively) making two parties resolve a disagreement.
Lord Curzon’s 1896 Problems of the Far East also describes the kowtow (i.e., kneeling thrice and knocking his forehead nine times on the ground (pg 265), explaining it as the mark of deference demanded from the Chinese Emperor as monarch of the whole earth. Curzon also describes the controversies around which envoys would recognise this sovereignty by kowtowing, and which would not. Which is how by 1896 to kowtow had already picked up its own extended meaning of fawning obsequiously.
To Shampoo
To shampoo is another linguistic latecomer that comes from Hindi, in which the verb चाँपना (cā̃pnā) means to press, pound or knead. In the mid-19th century the practice was to massage the body after running warm water and herbs over it. The pronunciation Shampoo चाँपो (cā̃po) is taken from second-person imperative form of the verb, so should be thought of as an order “Massage!”, as it was in the Sayings and Doings of Sayings and Doings of Mr. Samuel Slick (1844) by Canadian Judge Thomas Chandler Haliburton:
“No kissy, no kissy — shampoo is shampoo; but kissy is anoder ting. The noise brought the servants in, and says the queen, pínting to me, “shampoo him” — ad they up with me, and into another room, and before I could say Jack Robinson, off weny my clothes, and I was gettin’ shampmoo’d in airnest. It is done by a gentle pressure, and rubbin’all over the body with the hand; it is delightful — that’s a fact, and I was soon asleep”
Richard D. Mott of Boston, Massachusetts helped turn the verb into a noun, by patenting a medicated bath shampoo on December 16, 1833, and many new shampoos have followed since. Amazon.com sells over 10,000 of them.
To Galvanize
A final verb that English didn’t know it needed until the 19th century is to galvanize. The verb not only comes from Italian, it comes from a very specific Italian, namely the scientist Luigi Galvani (1737–1798).
Galvani is most famous for his investigations into ‘animal electricity’, specifically applying electrodes to (dead) frogs legs to make them twitch. Applying electricity to muscles in this way is one meaning of the verb ‘to galvanize’. Another meaning of the same verb is to coat a piece of iron or steel in a protective layer of zinc — a process called galvanization that also involves electricity.
While zinc-coating metals remains a specialist pursuit and shocking dead animals is now taboo, it is now perfectly respectable to galvanize almost anything from positive world-wide non-violent action to one’s own mind.
So, when you next shampoo your hair remember to massage all the way down to the linguistic roots. Don’t hurt your head kowtowing, and please think before running amok. You may galvanize your mind, but please not with electrodes.
Please respond with any other verbs you’d like me to look in to, or support the author by buying the brand new paperback “Contemplating Amok”.
