Out of the Branding Iron, Into the Fire

It’s now the barbecuing time of year, when charcoal glows and pungent sauces send aromas to perfume the patio, when gaudy-aproned husbands, wielding forks and grease-bespattered spatulas,bewitch their spouses and their wide-eyed progeny with harbingers of gustatory joys replete with spices from the supermart.

All of which reminds me that when I was one of those wide-eyed youths, sniffing the beefsteak-scented breeze and salivating like a starved Pavlovian pup, I believed that the word barbecue came from a large ranch in Texas whose brand was the “Bar B-Q.”

That bit of folk etymology had been passed on to me by one of my contemporaries--a boy whose family had moved from Texas to the suburbs of New York in the mid-’30s. The kid’s real name, as I recall, was Richard, but no one except a couple of teachers ever called him Richard, or even Dick or Dickie.

He wanted to be called Tex, and since we were all addicted to Saturday matinee Westerns, which were populated by guys named Tex, Abilene, Laredo, Wichita and Cheyenne, we went along with it.

He told us that the cowboys at this ranch would kill a steer and build a huge bonfire, cook the whole steer over it, and serve it to a hundred or more people. Since the Bar B-Q brand was on the steer’s hide, that type of cooking got to be known as Bar B-Q, or barbecue.

I think he believed his story. It had probably been told to him by a grown-up, maybe his father. It was many years before I had occasion to question the famous Bar B-Q Ranch. Most of the places that featured barbecues called themselves the Texas Bar B-Q, Big John’s Bar B-Q, or some other variation on the Bar B-Q theme, so it wasn’t a very farfetched etymology.

My faith in the Bar B-Q Ranch was shattered about 15 years ago when I received several letters asking if I couldn’t write something about the spelling barbeque , which my correspondents all hated. The gist of those letters was that barbeque should be pronounced barbeck. I agreed, and I wrote a short piece about it.

I can’t think of any instance where que is properly pronounced cue. It’s from the French and is always said as a hard c : Think of discotheque or the English cheque. I suppose the clincher is queue, in which the yew sound is provided not by the que, which gives us only a hard c , but by the final ue.

The English queue is either a pigtail or a line of people waiting for something. But queue is originally French, meaning tail.

Barbeque isn’t much in evidence anymore. I suspect that possibly the people who wrote me were but a small percentage of those who objected to that spelling and that perhaps additional thousands of irate barbeque -haters wrote letters to the perpetrators of those labels that said things like “Texas Barbeque Sauce,” and, since then, barbecue and bar b-q have taken over the field from barbeque more or less entirely. I study the supermarket shelves from time to time, and, while barbeque sauce is still available, it isn’t easy to find.

The French queue for tail brings us to a truly classic instance of bizarre folk etymology. In researching barbecue, I went to the Oxford English Dictionary. After telling us that barbecuing originated in the Caribbean, and that the word comes from the Spanish or Haitian barbacoa , a framework of green sticks or iron rods set on posts over an open fire for the alfresco roasting of meats, the dictionary says, in parentheses, “The alleged Fr. barbequeue , ‘beard to tail,’ is an absurd conjecture suggested merely by the sound of the word.”

I had never thought of “barbequeue-- beard to tail” as the origin of barbecue, but it immediately brought to my jumble-shop mind a disturbing image of Gabby Hayes on a huge gridiron over a bed of hot coals. The Gabby Hayes connection is tortuous, but, because our mental synapses zip along at about the speed of light, it is nevertheless instantaneous. The links of memory wind like lightning through a slice of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” those Saturday afternoon Westerns, and a bit of zoology. In “As You Like It,” Jaques, in his “All the world’s a stage” speech, says:

“Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard. . . .”

When I first read that line many years ago, the only pards I knew were from those Westerns, and they were usually sidekicks--pardners, or podners, or just pards: Gabby Hayes, of course. I was sure that, even back then, Shakespeare had something else in mind, and I later learned that the pard he was referring to was a leopard or a panther. We don’t think of beards as being among the outstanding features of leopards these days, but possibly the Elizabethans couldn’t picture a big cat without a beard.

I still can’t think of “bearded like the pard” without getting an image of Gabby Hayes or some other grizzled old podner. Barbequeue would be the roasting of a whole animal, beard to tail. An animal with a beard being a pard, and a pard being, of course, Gabby Hayes. As I said, it’s a disturbing image.

But it’s that time of year; where’s my apron?