Simian homonym

August 26th, 2009 at 07:00am Barry Wood

“Gorilla” is pronounced the same as “guerrilla,” which I wrote about the day before. They have been known to be mistaken for each other in print, but they are two entirely different animals.

The gorilla is the largest of the great apes and, says Webster’s, “is generally shy, intelligent and vegetarian.”

Slang use of the word for “a person regarded as like a gorilla in appearance, strength, etc.” is generally an insult to the person and the ape. Even more so its use as slang for “a gangster; thug.”

The word comes from the Greek “gorillai,” a term concocted in translating the reports of a Carthaginian navigator traveling along the coast of Africa in the fifth century B.C. That voyager, named Hanno, thought the creatures he was seeing were members of “a tribe of hairy women,” which was the literal meaning for the Greek word.

Roy Blount Jr., in “Alphabet Juice,” suggests the translators’ task was made more challenging by the Phoenician alphabet, which lacked vowels, and that another factor may have been that Hanno “had been at sea for a long time.”

Entry Filed under: homonyms, definitions, word origins