Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος

NOTE: Updates on The Romani basis of Kaliarda, updated.

What Petropoulos had not picked up on in his first edition was that the base of the distinctive lexicon of Kaliarda is Romani—something that he had emended by the second edition.

There is precedent for a Romani base in other Greek cants—notably the builders’ cant Dortika in Eurytania, which Manolis Triantafyllidis published on in 1923.¹

In his magisterial post but—or, the influences of Romani on Kaliarda, slang.gr user Poniroskilo has compared Petropoulos’ vocabulary against the ROMLEX database of Romani dialects and I. Alexiou’s dictionary of Romani, and come up with the following list of core Romani vocabulary in Kaliarda. (I’m adding a column for Dortika, though Triantafyllidis did not publish a lot of his material, and his published article only went through words starting with mu.)

(The multivalent verbs avelo and dzazo are light verbs, a type common in the borrowing of verbs into other languages: nouns are easier to borrow than verbs, so languages often borrow the nouns, and use vague verbs like “do” with them. In fact, contemporary Greek does that routinely with online communication verbs taken from English notions: κάνω subscribe, κάνω add, κάνω like.)

In his 2005 study², César Montoliu concludes that “Kaliardá is not a mixed Gypsy language. It is rather a slang or a professional jargon with an important Romani element in it.” Poniroskilo also cites Sofronis Chatzisavvidis of Thessalonica University (article no longer online) as saying that 15% of the Kaliarda vocabulary is Romani.

Montoliu adds his hypothesis “that it first appeared in a Romani speaking environment connected with male prostitution.” The smoking gun is in fact in Poniroskilo’s list, in the entry for balamo, as slang.gr commenter Vrastaman was delighted to realise:

Vrastaman: I always wondered where the dick [πού στον πούτσο] those two communities intersected. I never realised the obvious, that they intersected on dick! You found the missing link under balamo which explains everything. Respect!

Iron: It’d also be interesting to make a list of those words which have ended up in everyday Greek slang: τεκνό, πουρό, τζάζω, λουμπίνα, κουλό etc.

• tekˈno “toyboy, twink”,
• puˈro “dirty old man”,
• ˈdzazo “to send away, to get rid of”,
• luˈbina, variously defined on slang.gr “whore” (explained here as derived from the pseudonym of a well-paid female sex worker of the 1930s—clearly itself taken from the Romani for “whore”), “gay bottom”, and “cunning and conniving”,
• kuˈlo Kaliarda: “turd”; Standard Greek slang has meanings derived from its normal meaning “lame”: “nonsensical, unreasonable” (possibly independently from English lame); “left hand” in Koutsavakika—although one commenter speculates that the meaning “nonsense” derives from Kaliarda

John Black: Obviously, Vrasta. Gays would give 20 drachmas to a horny Gypsy kid, or buy him a cheese pie, and he’d stick it in them (τους τον φέρμαρε). See Giannaris’ classic film From the Edge of the City, although the male prostitutes in that film are ex-Soviet Pontic Greeks (ρουπούδες), not Roma.

• John Black’s ρουπούδες is an acronym, using the unofficial Greek syllabic alphabet: ρου που = ΡΠ = Ρωσσο-Πόντιοι “Russian Pontians”.

Having given what little information Petropoulos gives about the gay community that spoke Kaliarda, I am moving on to discussion of the cant itself. I’m putting Petropoulos’ own linguistic observations up first, with some comments of my own. I’m going to be vacillating between Greek and IPA for this, because I want to make sure this is accessible to people familiar with its source languages.

• p. 10. Just as the rebetiko toughs (the koutsavakides or manges) had their own slang, Koutsavakika, gays had their own cant, which they called:
  • καλιαρντή, καλιάρντω, καλιαρντά [all from the kaliarda adjective καλιαρντός “ugly, strange”],
  • λουμπινίστικα [from kaliarda λουμπίνα “gay”],
  • φραγκολουμπινίστικα “Westerner kaliarda” [referring to the high representation of Western European vocabulary—or to the precedent of “Frank” in expressions of mixed identity; cf. Frangolevantinika “Frankish Levantine”, the use of Roman script for Greek by Catholics]
  • τζιναβωτά [from kaliarda τζινάβω “to understand, to be initiated”]
  • λατινικά “Latin”, βαθιά λατινικά “deep Latin”
  • ετρούσκα “Etruscan”
  • λιάρντω [truncation of καλιάρντω]
  • ντούρα λιάρντα “hard Kaliarda”
• p. 10, p. 12. Of those terms, Kaliarda proper has some 300-400 words. Liardo and dura liarda (and presumably “deep Latin”) refer to “a katharevousa, as it were, of Kaliarda”—that is, to a more prestigious, elite variant of the cant (and not, as Greek Wikipedia misunderstood it, a version more influenced from Greek Puristic), spoken by a small group of initiates, recently formed, and featuring deliberately distorted words and new coinages; e.g. ðiˈkelo “to see, look” > kuˈelo, aˈvelo “to give, take, do, put, take out, want, have” > vuˈelo; ˈɡrifi “nail” < French griffe replaced by ɣeraˈkili < γεράκι “hawk”.
• Kaliarda has a distinctive intonation, and is spoken very fast—Petropoulos believes that was so as to preserve the secrecy of the cant. It also is spoken with gesticulation and effeminate posing (p. 13).
• p. 11. Kaliarda is becoming popularised outside its speaker base in other circles, notably actors. [In the case of Polari, it was the reverse direction: Italian ice-cream vendors > carnival and circus workers > actors > gays.] Koutsavakika too had become popularised among the bourgeoisie in the 1950s. [And as the slang.gr commenters note, Petropoulos’ own book contributed to popularising Kaliarda.]
• p. 12. Builders and traditional healers (“quacks”, κομπογιαννίτες) had their own cants as well. [For an extensive account of Greek cants, see this blog article by Angeliki Kardara: the professions she lists include fishermen, tinsmiths, barrel-makers, goldsmiths, builders, traditional healers, tailors, and metalworkers in general]
• Kaliarda is constantly developing. Gays draw on the Greek vernacular, Turkish, Italian, French and English. They do not use German or Russian; and Koutsavakika itself used only one German word, spreˈxaro < sprechen “to speak”.
• Koutsavakika has minimal contact with Kaliarda. There are 12 Kaliarda words in Koutsavakika, and those are already widespread in general slang; there are 10 Koutsavakika words in Kaliarda.
• p. 13. Kaliarda words are distorted words of Modern Greek (e.g. ˈduma < duˈmani < Turkish duman “smoke”), or rely on easily unravelled semantic shift (e.g. taˈpsi < Turkish tepsi: “baking pan” in Standard Greek, “mirror” in Kaliarda)
• Kaliarda relies on compounding extensively, and three-part compounds are routine.
  • slang.gr user aias.ath, who was already familiar with Kaliarda from neighbours in the 60s, reports that “Often certain words may seem to us uneconomical, but gays usually accomodate them by changing endings, cutting out or doubling syllables, so they could fit into flowing speech without hiatuses or redundant syllables. So for the uninitiated Kaliarda would sound like shifting sands, without actually being such.” [aias.ath also refers to Kaliarda speakers as “catamites”, but I think there’s been enough of that.]
• Speakers take pride in their command of Kaliarda: the question beˈnavis ta kaliarˈda? “do you speak Kaliarda?” is proudly answered with ke ta dziˈnavo ke ta beˈnavo “I both speak it and understand it”
• “The reader of this dictionary will see emerging from the structure ad spirit of Kaliarda words a panorama of the pagan, epicurean, conspiratorial, anarchic, apolitical and purely urban world of the catamites, where disrespect for religion contends with contempt towards feminine sexual gifts, and where various apposite caustic epithets ridicule both provincials and the police.”
• p. 183. The dictionary includes 3000 words of Kaliarda; a tenth are Dura Liarda. [The majority of them are opportunistic jocular compounds.]
• Kaliarda dates from Modern Greek urbanisation. The lemmata βλακοψαλιδού, κρυσταλλοσινού and οκτάρης can be dated:
  • vlakopsaliˈðu “stupid scissor chick” = “censorship”, which became prominent with the Metaxas regime of 1936
  • kristalosiˈnu “crystal cinema chick” = “television”
  • okˈtaris “eighter” = “member of parliament”, from their monthly salary of eight thousand drachmas. [Petropoulos does not say when that was their salary.]
  • More relevant for dating is aias.ath’s reference to venizeloðosˈmeni “Given Away By Venizelos” as a name for Constantinople (referring to the Treaty of Lausanne signed by Venizelos in 1923), and the verb bairaktaˈrizo “to punish”, referring to Athens Police chief Dimitrios Bairaktaris (1893–1897), who persecuted the koustavakis during his tenure.
• “The epigrammatic character of Kaliarda words is extraordinary”:
  • ˈafados “invisible, disappeared” = “God”
  • vaˈvelo “Babel chick” = “polyglot”
  • ɡodoˈkodra “counter-God” = “hell”
  • kavɣaðokuˈtu “argument box chick” = “radio”
  • maxmurˈlokaro “sleepyhead cart” = “road roller”

  [It gets much more clever than that.]

• Kaliarda often uses feminine suffixes on nouns and adjectives, either colloquial (καραπλατού, λούμπω) or pseudo-foreign (ροσολιμαντέ). [The -ού and -ω feminine suffixes are derogatory, and also feature in slang proper. The -ˈe ending is common in Greek slang, and derives from French -é.]
  • karaplaˈtu kara- (Turkish: “black”; Greek: augmentative, intensifier) + plati “back” + -ˈu “fem.” = “damned back thing (fem.)” = “shawl”
  • ˈlubo “gay” < Kaliarda lubina (fem.) “gay” + -o “fem.”
  • rosolimaˈde “licking” < roˈsoli “saliva” < rosolio “Italian rose petal liquer”.
• p. 184. Koutsavakika is a slang, injecting words into what is basically Modern Greek. Kaliarda is almost a complete language on its own, with distinct forms for most content words [and for a few function words; e.g. ˈdzakata “when”, kaˈtes, kaˈte, kaˈte “that”]
• Kaliarda verbs are usually formed from nouns, rather than the reverse.
• Kaliarda has ten colour terms: green, red, black, purple, yellow, blue, brown, light blue, royal blue, white.
• Adjectives are often feminine only: κρύφω ˈkrifo “secret” instead of κρυφός -ή -ό.
• p. 185. Kaliarda has a lot of words for genitals and sex, but no word for pleasure; sol means “sweetness” in general.
• Kaliarda has specific terms for all regions of Greece, for significant parts of Athens, for major tourist attractions, and for Paris and London.
  • dzinaˈvotopos “in-the-know place” = “London”, because of the pioneering recognition of gay rights in the UK in the 60s. (The attitude that Britain was a gay mecca was also held among straight Greeks.)
  • muˈdzotopos “cunt place” = “Paris”, as an easy contrast with London (place characterised as a straight mecca as opposed to a gay mecca)
  • turiˈstofaka “tourist trap” = “The Acropolis”
  • kseroskaˈtu “dry turd (fem.)” = “Epirus” (whose inhabitants were proverbially miserly, drawing on the saying that a miser would dry his own turds to eat as rusks)
  • teˈromudza “land palm” = “Peloponnese” (shaped like a palm)
  • teroɡaˈmila “land camel” = “Central Greece, Rumeli” (so called because it is mountainous)
• Kaliarda has its own proverbs; e.g. τζάκατα δικέλεις ντούμα χορχόρα αβέλεις τ’ άχατα “when you see smoke, you will have fire there”. (“Where there’s smoke there’s fire” is an English saying; it is not a Standard Greek saying.)

Supplemental to the previous post, I’ll add aias.ath’s own recollections:

The notion that Kaliarda peaked during the [1967–1974] dictatorship is incorrect. At that time (1971) the late outcast scholar Petropoulos published his work, but I recall that earlier than that we would go to Stakas’ taverna (Acharnai stop), who sang almost exclusively in Kaliarda. The taverna was full of older gays, whose conduct was at the limits of decency, and who seemed to me to be indulging in nostalgia. All sorts of curiousity seekers were also present, like us, university students at the time, attracted to the margins of society through our petit bourgeois mores. My father’s and godfather’s testimony, who were slumming it in the 20s, was that Kaliarda was at its peak then, when there was a true communicative use for it. I also recall that in the 60s, when I was a child, a company of well-off gays spoke Kaliarda in a neighbouring house, so that I wouldn’t understand what they were saying. When the book was published, it all looked familiar to me, so I learned it immediately; and I greatly upset them by understanding what they were saying, so they stopped speaking it, and I missed out on getting any practice.

I was asked to weigh in a couple of weeks ago on Facebook, on the provenance of the contemporary Greek slang word αγορίνα. It’s a term I myself, being in the diaspora, had not heard before this year, and I was suitably taken aback when I did first hear it. (“She’s calling me a female boy? Was it something I said?”)

The complications of the word are fascinating enough to deserve a post here. In fact, they’ll get two.

The morphology of the word are obvious enough. αγόρι “boy” (ultimately from Ancient Greek άωρος “unripe, untimely”) + feminine suffix -ίνα.

The semantics of the word are as complicated as you would expect from a word that switches the gender of “boy” to feminine.

The added frisson to the complicatedness of the semantics is, that your likely guess of what the word means is informed by the contemporary Zeitgeist; and your guess is mostly wrong—but wrong in interesting ways.

A feminine suffix on “boy” can have, at least, four interpretations:

1. A boy who acts/is perceived as a girl
2. A girl who acts/is perceived as a boy
3. A boy who acts/is perceived as a boy—where the feminine suffix is used for a secondary meaning, and does not directly refer to gender
4. A girl who acts/is perceived as a girl, defined as the female counterpart to a boy

With the increased visibility of transgender people and transgender issues, #1 would likely be the default interpretation for people in the modern West; cf. ladyboy in English. But αγορίνα was coined in a different social environment; one in which (a) transgender people were less visible; (b) transgender identity was much more nebulous, and in fact conflated routinely with both gay identity and cross-dressing identity.

As it turns out, the Greek word means #2, “tomboy”, in a rural context, and #3, “darling boy”, where the feminine suffix was used originally as an expression of endearment by mothers, and apparently now in slang among men. (The Facebook thread I was asked it from dismissed it as Greek “bro” speak.) #4 is rare (it seems to require you to have forgotten any distinct word for “girl”), but it is attested in dialect; there is a more widespread variant as an omen name, given to girls to express the wish that the next child be a boy. The genderfuck meaning inherent in #1 is possible, and it seems to colour the slang usage; but the historical precedent for genderfuck in Modern Greek, kaliarda, would have found αγορίνα too bland to bother with.

That αγορίνα would have been interpreted as “tomboy” in a more gender-conservative millieu should, I trust, not come as a surprise. The grammatical gender of αγορίνα inheres in its suffix, and an interpretation aligning grammatical to biological gender is less confronting to gender norms than an interpretation that differentiates grammatical from biological gender, and aligns it to behavioural gender: a tomboy is still a girl. After all, while Greeks have tomboys in traditional society, they are not the challenge to common understanding of gender that, say, the sworn virgins of northern Albania are; the tomboy can be dismissed safely as “just a phase”. (Rural norms would have seen to that.)

The interpretation as “darling boy” is somewhat more convoluted, and it does rely on a disconnect between grammatical gender and biological gender.

The semi-randomness of grammatical gender already makes it possible for there to be a disconnect between the two. So long as the predicate noun is an abstraction, men will not take offence if they are called a βεντέτα (French vedette) “a star”, or a προσωπικότητα “personality > VIP”. Similarly, the feminine augmentative -άρα can be used for macho males with impunity, although I have the impression that the masculine augmentative -αράς is more common; one will certainly see both the vocatives παιχτάρα “mighty soccer player (fem.)” and παιχταρά “mighty soccer player (masc.)”

But that’s because there’s content in the feminine morpheme that men can regard as manly praise, outweighing an incidental feminine gender. In the case of αγορίνα, or similar formations, that is not the case: the sole meaning of the feminine morpheme is to indicate that the referent is feminine. So a Greek straight man will take offence if he is called a γιατρίνα “female doctor (colloquial)” or an αθηναία “Athenian woman”.

So how is meaning #3, where the boy’s gender is not problematised, even possible?

The clue to #3 is in a different disconnect between grammatical and biological gender. Cross-linguistically, the neuter gender is associated not only with inanimate entities, that have no gender, but also with sexually immature entities, which do not yet express gender socially. As an extension of that meaning, neuters have come to have a hypocoristic meaning: they express affection, they indicate that something is cute—just as we think presexual children are cute. They can even be extended to one’s lover to express affection, even though the point of having a lover is some degree of sexual expression. So just as English uses baby as a term of affection, Greek can use neuters—even neuter pronouns. Απού τη χέρα το βαστώ και πάλι αναζητώ το, says the Cretan folk song: “I hold it by the hand, and I’m still missing it”—where “it” refers to one’s beloved, not in order to dehumanise them or misgender them, but as a sign of affection.

There is, it turns out, a subterranean current of Greek using feminine forms to refer to males, as a sign of affection: “darling boy, dear boy”. That current has to be subterranean enough not to lead to offence to straight men in traditional society. So it can’t be used in traditional Greek straight society, with a straight face, by straight men, or towards straight men. (There’s a reason for those “straight” qualifiers, and I’ll come to it.) It has to have been used in a social context where the referent’s masculinity is not seriously challenged, so that the secondary meaning of the feminine—someone society regards as lovely and loveable—is still accessible.

It is possible, and it’s more readily possible in Greek than in English (to judge by the snickering I seem to be faintly hearing.) It happens between a mother and her son during childhood.

• Not used by a straight man: check.
• Not used towards a straight man: check.
• Not liable to be construed as an insult: check.
• Not used by someone seen as threatening to gender norms: check.

I can’t find online corroboration, but I’m sure my mother called me κανακάρα “darling (fem.)” as well as κανακάρη “darling (masc.)”; and I have an only partly suppressed memory of my grandmother calling me καλή μου “my dear (fem.)”, and me hoping at the time that it was a speech error.

Moerover, senses #2 “tomboy”, #3 “dear boy”, and #4 “girl” are all attested in Greek dialect, as of 1933, when the first volume of the Academy of Athens’ Historical Dictionary of Modern Greek (in reality the Modern Greek dialect dictionary) came out:

Search results for αγωρ:

• ἀγωροκόριτσο, τό (lit. “boy-girl”) (Kos, Imbros, Samos) 1. Young woman, maiden having the conduct, the manners of a male child: Δε dρέπισι να τρέχ’ς όξου σαν αγουρουκόρ’τσου; “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, running around outside like a tomboy?” (Imbros) Αυτή είν’ αγουρουκόρ’τσου “She is a tomboy”. (Samos). 2. Maiden having the aspect of a male child (Kos etc.)
  • This is the Standard Modern Greek for “tomboy”
• ἀγῶρα, ἡ. (Epirus; Syros: Ermoupolis). 1. Girl (Epirus). Song: Εμπάτ’, αγώρες, στο χορό να μάθετε τραγούδια “Enter the dance, girls, to learn songs”. The word is also used as a proper name (Macedonia). 2. Male child, boy, usually as a term of endearment addressed to a male child (Syros: Ermoupolis): Έλ’, αγώρα μου! “Come, my boy!”
• ἀγωρίτσα, ἡ (Peloponnese: Arcadia, Kalavryta) Girl. The word is also used as a proper name: Thessaly (Karditsa), Thrace.
• ἀγωροῦ, ἡ. (Thrace: Saranta Ekklisies (now Kırklareli, Turkey), Aenus (now Enez, Turkey), Komotini) Girl having the conduct, the manners of a young man. Τι αγωρού είσαι, μωρή! “What sort of a tomboy are you, damn you!” (Saranta Ekklisies) Αυτή είναι αγωρού “She is a tomboy” (ibid.) The word is also used as a proper name: Thrace.
• ἀγώρω, ἡ. (Eastern Rumelia: Karyes (now Oreshnik, Bulgaria), Thrace: Saranta Ekklisies) 1. Girl, maiden having the conduct, the manners of a young man (Saranta Ekklisies): Πού ήσουν, μωρή αγώρω; “Where were you, you damn tomboy?”. 2. Girl, maiden (Karyes): Song: Άνοιξ’ άνοιξ’ αγώρω μου, ήρθαν τα μαύρα μάτια “Open up, open up, my girl, the dark eyes [i.e. the person with dark eyes] have arrived.” The word is also used as a proper name: Thessaly, Thrace.
• ἀγωρῖνα, ἡ. (Thrace: Saranta Ekklisies, Selybria (now Silivri, Turkey)) 1. Girl having the conduct, the manners of a young man (Saranta Ekklisies): Πού ήσου, μωρή αγωρίνα; (πού εγύριζες έξω, όπως οι νέοι;) “Where were you, you damn tomboy?” (that is, where were you wandering outside, like young men do?) (Saranta Ekklisies) 2. Male child, boy, usually term of endearment addressing a male child (Thrace: Selybria): Αγωρίνα μου! “My dear boy!”

You’ll notice a disproportionate representation of the broader region of Thrace (including the parts of geographic Thrace that are now in Bulgaria and Turkey). I would not pay much attention to that. Volume I of the Historical Dictionary came out in 1933. The Academy of Athens was in the process of copying the manuscripts of the Philological Association of Constantinople, when the Greco-Turkish War happened, and (as far as I know) decided there was no Philological Association of Constantinople to return the materials to. The Philological Association of Constantinople had been gathering dialect material for fifty years, while the Academy only started in the 1910s. So we would expect Thrace (the rural neighbourhood of Constantinople) to be overrepresented in Vol. 1.

We would also expect terms like “tomboy” to be underrepresented in general, the way the dictionary’s data was gathered: up until the 50s, data was gathered as glossaries of unusual words, rather than being extracted from running text. The form appears to be widespread enough not to have been seen as particularly exotic.

Pause, finally, for the old-fashioned spelling of ἀγωρ- with an omega. That’s the kind of etymological spelling that made all the sense in the world in the 1930s, and that has been abandoned now, becoming the contrarian preserve of Babiniotis. The spelling rule used to be: if a marked spelling of a vowel (<η, ω, αι>, etc) can be found somewhere in the history of a vernacular form, it should be preserved in the spelling of that form. The spelling rule has now become: if the marked spelling in the history of a vernacular form is not blindingly obvious, ignore it and used the unmarked spelling instead (<ι, ο, ε>). αγόρι < ἄωρος is not blindingly obvious; hence αγόρι is no longer spelled with an omega.

Now, the forms line up against their definitions like so:

I don’t know that any particular correlations can be drawn between the meanings, with the exception of the omen name, which to me patterns strongly with the meaning “girl”. (“You’re a girl, but I wish you were a boy, so I’ll call you Female Boy.”) Αγορού is used as an omen name but not in the meaning “girl”; but αγορού and αγόρω are from the same area and are related—-ού is the modern reflex of Ancient -ώ—so I suspect that αγορού did also mean “girl”.

So αγόρα in Ermoupolis, and αγορίνα in Thrace, already meant “boy as a term of endearment”, with no direct indication of femininity, in 1933. The fact that the form turns up in Ermoupolis is itself significant: Ermoupolis was founded by refugees during the Greek War of Independence, and it was identified as an early site for the formation of Standard Modern Greek as a dialect koine. The use of αγόρα as a term of endearment there is consistent with that use of feminine endearments for boys being pandialectal. And the fact that αγορίνα was only attested in Thrace is likely a coincidence due to gaps in data collection, rather than providing a Thracian (or Constantinopolitan) lineage for the modern slang use of the term.

So much for 1933. The word αγορίνα does not turn up in Danguitsis’ dictionary of slang from 1967,⁴ nor Zahos’ dictionary from 1981.⁵ On Google Books, it turns up somewhere in a 1941 journal on Thracian dialect. It shows up in the second edition of Vlastos’ Thesaurus, from 1989, as a hyponym of “girl”; but it does not show up in the first edition from 1931 (although αγοροκόριτσο and αγριοκόριτσο “wild girl” do). Koulakis’ Μεγάλο ετυμολογικό λεξικό της νεοελληνικής γλώσσας from 1993 gives it only as “tomboy”, and so does Demetrakos’ dictionary from 1953.

On the other hand, the Triantafyllidis Institute’s dictionary (1998) gives it as “term of endearment for a boy, or more generally for a familiar male person”. Babiniotis (2nd ed, 2005) lists it under αγώρι (because that’s how he spells it), as “term of endearment used in address”. And the Papyros dictionary, Λεξικό της Ελληνικής Γλώσσας 2006, which is a reworking of Demetrakos, has “tomboy; (as term of endearment) dear boy”. (No, I don’t own the Academy of Athens’ new Dictionary Of Modern Greek Usage. Yet.)

There are gaps enough in the record that it’s not 100% clear what happened; but what seems to have happened is that the motherly use of αγορίνα has generalised recently, to a term that can be used by and to grown straight men. In the process, the older meaning “tomboy” has been displaced; in the Facebook thread that started this, a user expressed surprised at my announcement of that older meaning.

But the use of αγορίνα among straight men can’t be just an idle generalisation. All the senses of αγορίνα to this point have been safe for the patriarchy: criticising girls’ failure to adhere to gender norms; wishing girls were boys; women expressing intimacy towards their prepubescent sons strictly within the hearth. None of those senses questions a man’s virility in the public sphere. Bros calling each other αγορίνα does not follow that pattern.

I find no evidence that sense #1, “effeminate boy”, ever existed for αγορίνα; but it can exist, and people react to its current use as if it does exist. If straight men are suddenly calling each other in Greece αγορίνα, they aren’t likely to be doing so with a straight face. The term is something of a challenge—even if it’s only as mild a challenge as the use of ladies by coaches towards sportsmen in English. The reactions towards the word on slang.gr deserve their own article—as does the fact that Greek street queans of the 1960s did not use the word αγορίνα in sense #1, and wouldn’t have.

In my post on the formation of speciesism, I noted that

Speciesism is a coinage so clueless about how Latin works, it could only have been coined in English, and in English after people stopped learning classical languages, at that. (It dates from 1970.) The -es in Latin is an inflection. You never ever put derivational suffixes like -ism after inflections. Except if you have no idea about the language you’re putting the suffixes onto, to begin with. The Latinically correct way of coining the word would have been specism, and you do indeed see that as a less frequent alternative to speciesism.

…

Now, Greek avoided spisisismos, and rendered the term as spisismos as the main rendering of speciesism (although Wikipedia does also list σπισισισμός.) I’d like to think that Greeks recognised the inflection in speci-es-ism, and had their linguistic sensibilities offended, as fellow speakers of a highly inflected language. It’s far likelier that they simply threw a haplology at the problem: /sp-is-is-mos/ already sounds ludicrous enough, /sp-is-is-is-mos/ could not be taken seriously by anyone.

I was heartened to see commenter Pepe [Georgios-Perikles Schinas], at Nikos Sarantakos’ blog, expressing those offended linguistic sensibilities. Just so you don’t think I’m making this stuff up.

It features the delightful Greek slang word καφρίλα, the stench (-ila, i.e. characteristic) of a kafros (someone who does not give a crap about bothering other people; derived, as it turns out, from kaffir “infidel to Islam” via Italian cafro.)

Pepe, 31 October, 2017 13:42 :

That was no haplology. That was a correction of an error.

Speciesism is an English word derived from an unassimilated Latin loan, species, and a productive ending also borrowed from Latin (-ism < Latin -ismus, ultimate derivation from Greek though that is irrelevant here.) So it is a purely Latin word, which was formed now and not when Latin was a living language.

But it was formed utterly irregularly. Sticking derivational (or inflectional) endings on a complete word to generate a new one is the kind of boorishness [καφρίλα] that would be committed only by someone unaware that there are languages outside of American English; and who isn’t even that deeply familiar with American English itself. Seen very superficially, English words look like they are derived in that way. They aren’t of course in English, and even less so in Latin. It’s as if we tried to derive an equivalent word in Greek from eid-os and ended up saying eid-os-ismos.

I think that a Latin speaker would not even think in such a way as to come up with deriving such forms; but if forced to he would say speciismus or, by contraction, specismus. So speci(i)sm in English. Therefore, now that we are left with conventional hellenisation of the English, σπισισμός (because directly from Latin it would be σπεκι(ι)σμός.)

I’m sure that the Greek antispecisisist window-smashers had that in mind, and corrected the extraneous -si-.

Maria, 31 October, 2017 16:53

A pedantic note: the ending on 5th declension nouns is -ie- and not -e-, so spec-ie-s > spec-ism(us).

Pepe, 31 October, 2017 17:21:

[…]

At any rate, the corresponding Latin or Greek terms of sundry sciences and disciplines are usually formed correctly, by scientists or intellectuals who were neither Greeks nor, of course, ancient Romans. And typically they were neither linguists nor classicists, so those linguistic mechanisms were not part of their ground knowledge. But they were familiar with those mechanisms: something that demonstrates a certain broad-mindedness. The ill-formed speciesism, so we read, was not formed by the window-smashers, but possibly by a British psychologist. And fine, he didn’t know any Latin: that in itself does not show narrow-mindedness. But he didn’t even realise that somewhere in between English and Latin, there was something that he did not know about. That leaves a bad impression. I’ll acquit him for insufficient evidence (“the term was coined or popularised by the British psychologist Richard Ryder in 1973″), but there is a shadow cast over somebody.