24 May 2020
Bizarre is a word with a rather straightforward etymology. English borrowed it from French in the mid seventeenth century, which in turn had borrowed it from the Italian bizzarro. But that has not stopped some baseless speculation about a weirder origin of the word.
The original Italian meaning of bizzarro is angry. The word appears in Dante’s early 14th century Divine Comedy. From the Inferno, canto 8:
Tutti gridavano: “A Filippo Argenti!”;
e ’l fiorentino spirito bizzarro
in sé medesmo si volvea co’ denti.(They all were shouting: “At Filippo Argenti!”
the spirit of the wrathful Florentine
turning, meanwhile, his teeth against himself.)
Dante populated his hell with people he disliked (and some of his friends). Filippo Argenti was a aristocrat of Florence who had wronged Dante in some way (commentary differs on exactly what the dispute was).
Filippo also appears in Boccaccio’s Decameron, the ninth day, eighth story, where again bizzarro is one of his defining characteristics. In this case the translator choses choleric as its English equivalent:
Filippo Argenti, uomo grande e nerboruto e forte, sdegnoso, iracundo e bizzarro piú che altro.
(Filippo Argenti, a tall man and stout, and of a high courage, and haughty, choleric and cross-grained as ne'er another.)
The Decameron was written 1349–51, about thirty years after Dante’s death.
In later Italian usage, bizzarro developed the meaning of strange or odd, and French borrowed this meaning in the early sixteenth century. And this sense was borrowed into English in the mid seventeenth century. Edward Herbert, a soldier, diplomat, poet, and philosopher, is the first person known to have used bizarre in English. In his autobiography, of uncertain date but certainly written before his death in 1648, he describes a woman:
Her gown was a green Turkey grogram, cut all into panes or slashes, from the shoulder and sleeves unto the foot, and tied up at the distance of about a hand’s-breadth every where with the same ribband, with which her hair was bound; so that her attire seemed as bizare as her person.
The word has maintained this sense in English ever since.
Despite the etymology of bizarre being a rather ordinary one, a false etymology developed claiming that it comes from the Basque bizarra, meaning beard. The false etymology developed not only because the words are superficially similar, but perhaps out of a desire that a word meaning odd should not have an ordinary history, and also perhaps because Basque is a tempting language to associate with any word. Basque, a language of the Pyrenees region between France and Spain, is a language isolate, unrelated to any other living language; it’s not Indo-European like the languages that surround it. Basque, a linguistic oddity, is simply too tempting for some not associate with bizarre.
In this case, the guilty party appears to be the nineteenth-century French lexicographer Émile Littré, who first put forward the idea that bizarre comes from the Basque word for beard. His argument is simple and, at first blush, tempting. In Spanish, bizarro means brave or gallant, and the phrase hombre de bigote (literally, man with a moustache) means a man of spirit, of bravery. The Spanish must, Littré reasoned, have gotten the word, with its association with facial hair, from their next-door neighbors, the Basques. His argument is seemingly bolstered by the fact that in early French use, bizarre could also mean brave. Littré believed French had borrowed the word from Spanish.
Unfortunately for Littré and his argument, the borrowing goes the other way. Bizarre is not attested in Spanish until the late sixteenth century, well after it was established in French. It seems that the Spanish borrowed the brave sense of the word from French. The evolution from anger to bravery is a natural one, just think of the wrath of Achilles, a great warrior, that drives the plot of the Iliad. The brave sense eventually fell out of use in French, but it held on in Spanish, where it is the primary meaning of the word today.
So, it seems that the Basque bizarra, meaning beard, and our word bizarre are false cognates. They look like they should be related, but they aren’t.
Sources:
The Decameron Web. Brown University, Italian Studies Department, 2014.
Langdon, Courtney. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, vol. 1 Inferno. Harvard University Press, 1918.
The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories, Merriam-Webster, 1991, s.v. bizarre.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. bizarre adj. and n.