June 14, 2001

kangaroo

On a recent Hollywood Squares program, one of the questions was, "When a European saw a kangaroo for the first time, he asked an aboriginal man what it was, and the man answered, 'kangaroo'. What does kangaroo mean?" The answer was, "I don't know." While I laughed, am I in trouble if I rely on Hollywood Squares for answers to etymological questions?

I don't think you're in trouble at all. (I rely more on Jeopardy myself.) You'll see.

Kangaroo owes its entrance into the English language to the intrepid British explorer, Captain James Cook. (Cook was also responsible for introducing the word tattoo.) Cook sailed from England in 1768 on the Endeavour. On the night of June 11, 1770, while passing through the Great Barrier Reef off what is now north Queensland, Australia, the Endeavour hit a reef and started taking water. The ship was beached, and the crew began making repairs. It was here, near what Cook named the Endeavour River, that he saw his first kangaroo, later noting in his journal: "The animals which I have before mentioned, called by the Natives Kangooroo or Kanguru."

The "Natives" he referred to were the Guugu Yimidhirr people, and so the aboriginal language he heard was theirs. The Australian National Dictionary traces kangaroo to the Guugu Yimidhirr word ganjurru, 'a large black or grey kangaroo, probably the male Macropus robustus'. This would seem a pretty open and shut case, but, in fact, this has been contested. Other British explorers, landing at different points along the Australian coast, found the kangaroo called by different names altogether. Commenting on this controversy, one 19th century scholar went so far as to say that "this word, supposed to be Australian, is not to be found as the name for this singular marsupial animal in any language of Australia." The theory goes that Cook got the wrong word for the right animal.

Which leads us to Hollywood Squares. Here's the scoop behind their answer, as reported by the Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins: "Cook asked a native...for the name of a strange marsupial Cook had spotted. The native answered, 'kangaroo', or 'I don't know'. Cook assumed this was what the native people called the animal, which is how kangaroo (or 'I don't know') got in the dictionaries." But take heed: the OED says that this theory "seems to be of recent origin and lacks confirmation."

Kangaroo, by the way, has a tantalizingly roundabout association with kangaroo court. In the 19th century, these animals were thought to have been able to defy the laws of nature--which is what kangaroo courts seemed to have done, too.

Richard