How might an oath lend its name in England to a religious extremist and in Spain to a moustache? That has been the claim for the German bei Gott as the origin of English bigot and Spanish bigote.
In his Gatherings from Spain (1846), the great English traveller Richard Ford did not doubt the origin of bigote, ‘moustache’. ‘The free-riding followers of Charles V, who wore these tremendous appendages of manhood,’ he explains, ‘swore like troopers.’ The Spanish connected their oath bei Gott with their moustaches, and named the one thing from the other. Did not the French in the Peninsular War, he observes, call the English soldiers Goddams?
The trouble is that the Spanish word bigote for ‘moustache’ had been listed in 1495 (five years before Charles V was even born) in Antonio de Nebrija’s Spanish-Latin dictionary.
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