Say the Magic Word

The N-word is still the most powerful word in the English language

It’s widely accepted by linguists that the ancient Indo-Europeans—the forefathers of modern Europeans—simply would not say the word for “bear.” The word existed, yes, but they wouldn’t say it. In that regard, they’re actually not so different from Americans today. Let me explain.

One of the great achievements of nineteenth-century linguistics was to show that the various European languages all derived from a common ancestor, generally referred to as “proto-Indo-European.”

Words in modern European languages that designate the same thing, however different they may appear on the surface, can be traced back to a single master word.

Think of the modern European languages as the branches of a great big tree. Proto-Indo-European is the trunk and root system.

Proto-Indo-European was never written down, so these master words are reconstructions on the basis of inference and relationship between words across languages through time.

Often these reconstructed master words are strikingly familiar.

For example, the master word for “mother,” “mère,” “madre,” “mutter,” “matke” and so on has been reconstructed as *méh₂-ter. (Just don’t pronounce the asterisk or the teeny-tiny little “2.”)

The master word for “bear,” however, is not recognizable—at least not if you’re a speaker of a Germanic or Slavic language.

The Proto-Indo-European master word for “bear” is *rkso-, from which derives the Latin “ursus” and the Ancient Greek “arktos.” The original meaning of these words is probably something like “destroyer.” Bears are destroyers, for sure.

But then there’s the English word “bear,” the Dutch “beer,” the German “baer”—all words that derive from the word for “brown.”

Rather than being “the destroyer,” the bear became “the brown one.” Bears are brown.

Slavic words for bear are slightly more poetic. The Russian “medved” and Polish “niedzwiedz” both mean something like “honey-eater.” Bears do eat honey.

So why? Why focus on the bear’s color or his charming propensity to rummage through beehives and not his ability to rip off your limbs and eat your face?

Linguists think it might have something to do with the historical range of bears in Europe. Bears were once common throughout Europe, but their range contracted significantly from south to north in ye olden days, so that an encounter became significantly less likely if you were a Roman in a toga or an Ancient Greek reading Plato. The forest-dwelling Germans, by contrast, would still have encountered bears on a regular basis.

In short, the linguists believe, the use of euphemisms was a taboo, an act of reverence designed to ward off the very real possibility of an encounter with a creature that could, well, rip off your limbs and eat your face. The Roman and Greeks could afford to use the original term, or a derivation of it, because the thing it signified held only a distant terror. The Germans and Slavs, by contrast, could not. The terror was still immediate and real.

And? What on earth has this got to do with anything? I’m glad you asked.