Just like people, there are words that do a lot more than their fair share of the work, and other words that get by without doing much at all.
A word that falls into the latter camp is “chevachee”, which I hadn’t encountered before Anu Garg made it his Word a Day on Friday. (If you don’t already get fascinating daily words from Wordsmith.org, I highly recommend you sign up immediately.)
Chevachee, pronounced “shuh-vuh-shay” is an old word meaning a raid, an expedition, or a campaign.
You could say there was a successful chevachee to change the name of Port Elizabeth to Gqeberha, the Xhosa name for the river that flows through the city.
Durban’s Zulu name, eThekwini, also has watery associations. According to former mayor Obed Mlaba, “eThekwini” is related to bull’s testicles, which are apparently similarly shaped to the bay of Durban when viewed from a certain angle.
Be that as it may, it brings us to “bay”, which is one of those small and seemingly insignificant words that shoulder many responsibilities.
As a noun, bay is most commonly understood as an inlet or a recess in the shore of a sea or a lake. This meaning, says the Online Etymology Dictionary, comes from the Latin baia and/or the ancient Celtic bahia, both meaning a beachy estuary of sorts.
Bay, however, wears many other hats. It also means “an opening in a wall” (from which we get bay windows) and “a compartment for storage” from which we get sick bays.
Then there’s the bay of a dog or a wolf, defined by the OED as a “deep-toned howl”. In countries where hounds are (mostly controversially) still used for hunting, the collective noise made by the dogs who have scented prey is known as “baying”.
Bay in this sense is also a verb meaning to bark or howl. Residents of Nelson Mandela Bay might perceive a use for both word forms in the name of their hometown. Their bay might simply refer to the city’s location in a carved-out armpit of the ocean, or it could be used as a verb form, as in those who bay, in the spirit of our greatest leader, for justice, water, electricity and so on.
To keep someone “at bay” now means to escape from harm or misfortune, but in its original form at abai referred to hunted animals which had been trapped with no way of escape. A related phrase is “in abeyance” — suspended in a state of expectation — which strikes a chill into those of us whose dissertations are overdue.
Be that as it may, it brings us to ‘bay’, which is one of those small and seemingly insignificant words that shoulder many responsibilities.
Incidentally, the Old French word “bayer” — literally meaning “wide open” (as in a mouth or gullet) but also the noise made by a hunted animal — gave us not just “bay” and “beagle” (a hunting dog that bays) but also “bawl”. The OED says bawl cried its way into English in the mid-15th century, derived from the Old Norse baula, meaning to howl like a dog, or to low like a cow in need of milking. About a century later it began to be used to describe people who shout loudly, and in 1908 was appropriated into US slang, in which “to bawl someone out” means to chastise or reprimand them, as a sergeant major might his errant troops.
Getting back to bay, it is also the name of a tree and the fragrant leaves derived there from. On top of that, it is used to describe the colour of a reddish-brown horse.
This discovery pleased me. One of my most-read books as a child was a compendium of “famous and fabulous horses”. Among these beasts was Bayard, “the horse from the forest”, tamed by the mythical knight Renaud, who rode the horse to Charlemagne’s court. The emperor demanded the magnificent stallion for himself, but Bayard would yield to no hand but Renaud’s, so Charlemagne had him thrown into the river with a millstone round his neck.
Since this was a children’s book, the horse escaped and lived to bay another day.
I still have the book so I can quote directly from it: “When the emperor saw that the horse was still alive he almost lost his wits with rage. He screamed and shouted and cursed; but all the knights were glad. Bayard wheeled and ran into the forest as if the wind were carrying him home. He was back where Renaud had found him, running wild among the trees.”
I hope this was true. It helps keep some nightmares at bay.
