21 Mar /16

Guinea pig

Guinea pig - Word of the day - EVS Translations
Guinea pig – Word of the day – EVS Translations

On one of those days, when you find yourself thinking about guinea pigs, you probably imagine a large tuft of orange or black fur that lives in a box in the garden of a seven year old child. They don’t do a great deal—they squeak a lot, nibble things, and will make great efforts to reproduce given half the chance. Nevertheless, their big black eyes, little voices, and fluffy quiffs make them quite endearing creatures.

In actual fact, the guinea pig—which is not from Guinea and isn’t a pig—has had a pretty interesting life. They were domesticated in the Andes region of South America about 5,000 years ago, travelled the world on ships with Spanish, Dutch and English traders, warmed the laps of royalty (even Queen Elizabeth I couldn’t resist their twitching noses and odd proportions), they were used in traditional healing to diagnose illness, and they were worshipped by an ancient Peruvian tribe.

But why is this rodent called a pig? And if it originates from South America, why the word ‘guinea’?

The pig element to the word could be because the guinea pig and pig share some similarities in terms of their anatomies. And that, when they travelled on ships, people likened them to livestock such as pigs (both would be shipped and eaten). There is no definitive answer.
The use of ‘guinea’ in their name is also unclear, though it’s an interesting word. It comes from the 15th century Portuguese word Guiné, used to describe an area of West Africa from Sierra Leone to Benin. The British, however, began to use the word ‘guinea’ not only to talk about this region of Africa (and the gold coins they used for trading there), but for any distant and unknown foreign land. By the end of the 19th century, the word was appearing in English print as a derogatory name for Italian or Spanish immigrants. When Italians emigrated en masse to the USA, they were met with extreme racial prejudice and were referred to as ‘dagos’, ‘WOPS’ or ‘guineas’. In the reference work Dialect Notes by the American Dialect Society (1896), ‘guinea’ is given a simple definition—“An Italian”. The word can also be found, with a slightly different spelling, in a 1910 edition of the U.S. newspaper Saturday Evening Post: “Almost every Ginny..or Dutchman who lands in New York has..the address of some..cheap hotel” (Sept. 18/1).

It could be, then, that this little rodent was called a guinea pig because it was shaped like a miniature pig and came from an unknown foreign land.