Barbecue - from Barbacoa or from Barbe à Queue?

Now that I’ve gotten on the subject of barbecue, let’s talk about it some.  A good place to begin is with the word barbecue itself.

According to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, Third edition, barbecue comes from the American Spanish barbacoa, which was adopted in turn from the Tainó, a people indigenous to the Caribbean region.  In the Tainó language, barbacoa means, literally, framework of sticks.  According to the Wikipedia article barbecue, not only is the word barbecue derived from the word barbacoa, but also the word barbacoa is found in the language of the Timucua people of Florida as well as in that of the Tainó.  The Wikipedia article differs with Webster, however, as to the literal meaning of the word.  According to Wikipedia, barbacoa means sacred fire pit.  One thing that there’s no disagreement about, though, is that the word barbecue is not derived from the French barbe à queue, which means from
beard to tail

Well, hell. For all these years, that’s where I thought barbecue came from.  It’s just a damn shame that it doesn’t.  If it did, we in the Southeast might have some real leverage when we insist that if the dish is to be called barbecue, it must be pork.  According to legend, you see, French visitors to a Caribbean island saw the locals cooking a whole hog over a fire in a pit, and one of the visitors remarked to the others that the unfortunate porker was being cooked from beard to tail, or barbe à queue.  Anyhow, again according to legend, the term caught on and the rest is history.  If that were really how the name barbecue came about, not only could we Southeasterners insist that barbecue has to be pork, but if push came to shove in cook-off showdowns with non-believers, we could insist that in order to call it barbecue, it had to be a whole hog.  Either way, we’d have them disqualified on a technicality.

It is just possible, incidentally, that barbe à queue is really the origin of the word barbecue, but the truth is being suppressed by a conspiracy.  There is a significant segment of barbecue society who believe that you can have barbecue beef and barbecue chicken and barbecue turkey, and on and on, the important thing being the belief that you can have barbecue that isn’t pork.  It follows that there might be certain individuals among us with private and nefarious reasons for not wanting the sacred truth, that barbecue must be pork, to get out.  Certain wealthy but unscrupulous people, you see; renegade Texans or Californians, maybe.  Anyway, such a gang of rascals might have pooled their resources and approached the world’s etymologists – scholars who study the origins of words.  Well, everyone has his price, you know,  and scholars as a group are not exactly known for their wealth.  Thus would the scalawags have been able to bribe a majority of these scholars, impoverished creatures that they are, to say that barbacoa is where the word barbecue comes from, even if they knew or suspected otherwise.  Hey, it could have happened . . .

Happy cooking!