[Ads-l] "Lagniappe" (slight antedating, 1846)

[Laurence Horn]

Thanks to Bonnie for the pointer to the Twain et al. on “lagniappe”, and to the temporary link to the full article.  I’m convinced: Quechua _yapa_ > Spanish (la) ñapa > reanalysis of article > Louisiana French /la'niap/.  So be it.

I find far more remarkable Gillet's proffered derivation (pp. 97-8) of “bull” (‘deceit, falsehood, nonsense’, as in "shoot the bull") from a Gypsy source designating ‘anus’ or possibly sexual parts with no relation whatsoever to “bullshit” or, indeed, to the male bovine Gillet delicately identifies as the “cow-brute”.  As someone doing research on bullshit (although not on “bullshit”), I would be curious to know if anyone has given credence to this proposed etym(yth?)ology.  Would the editor of the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, which (Volume I, p. 298) attributes the relevant sense of “bull” (‘lies, flattery, insincerity, nonsense, empty talk, etc.’) to (of all things!) a truncation of “bullshit”, care to defend his work? 

LH 


> On Apr 3, 2021, at 8:44 AM, Bonnie Taylor-Blake <b.taylorblake at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I haven't gone looking for more recent research disputing that proposed origin, but I'm sharing Joseph E. Gillet's 1939 note in American Speech on this, mostly because I was delighted by his introductory paragraphs. (The following link will be good for about about a week. I hope that the American Dialect Society and Duke University Press will overlook my sharing this PDF without prior permission just this once.)
> 
> http://www.med.unc.edu/uploads/bbjhf.jegilletle.pdf
> 
> (Oh, and a thank-you goes to Garson O'Toole for finding a slightly earlier 1846 appearance in print.)
> 
> -- Bonnie
> 
> 
> On Fri, Apr 2, 2021 at 10:13 PM Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> 
> Is the suggested etymology at the Wiki-entry and alluded to in the spelling “la gniappe” in one of Bonnie’s early cites--
> 
> Lagniappe is derived from the South American Spanish phrase la yapa or ñapa (referring to a free extra item, usually a very cheap one). La is the definite article in Spanish as well as in French (la ñapa or la gniappe = the ñapa/gniappe). The term has been traced back to the Quechua word yapay ('to increase; to add’).
> 
> -- widely accepted? I’ve seen “o.o.o.” elsewhere, and the OED splits the difference, including the Spanish “la ñapa” part of the derivation, but not the Quechua verb.  Either way, the earlier Spanish version makes “lagniappe” another member of the reanalyzed borrowed definite article club (algebra, alcohol, apricot, lute, et al.).  The local (New Haven) version of “pizza”—“apizza”, pronounced a-BEETS, from the Campanian pronunciation of “la pizza”—is a tasty member of the same club.  
> 
> Unclear to me where the ñ came from, but it’s a short step from “ya” to "ña”.  Maybe the ñ is just a lagniappe.   
> 
> LH. 

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