Mind Your Language | 24 January 2009

I am not going to go on about the word Paki, though it has an interesting enough history. But when I used the word Spaniard recently, my husband asked: ‘Are you allowed to say that these days?’ I wondered, until I heard a Spaniard use it himself on Radio 4. So it must be all right. A cause for unease at this designation of Spanish people is the connotation of the suffix -ard. Consider these examples: bastard, coward, drunkard, laggard, sluggard, braggard, stinkard. Neither mallard nor wizard are very strong counter-examples, the first coming from the word male (though female ducks of this kind exist too), and the second being once as pejorative as witch.

It makes no difference that the element -ard comes from the Germanic hard, meaning ‘strong’ (hence its popularity in names such as Richard, ‘power-strong’, Reynard, ‘advice-strong’, or Everard, ‘boar-strong’). Words do not mean now what their etymological ancestors once meant.