Calling all balletomanes - etymology of some of the common terms in dance

In the first in a series of articles on the language of the performing arts, Catherine Barber answers the literary question, "What's in a word?".

Callipygian. Now there's a fine last word for you. Barely had the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, of which I am editor, arrived from the printers, before a fellow ballet student of mine asked if "callipygian" was in it. No, I said, it was too rare for a dictionary of this size, but we did have the related "steatopygia". Later I was recounting this when giving a talk about the dictionary to a grade nine class. "Oh," said their teacher, "now that might come in handy when we go to the ballet next month." So what does this word mean? Is it some nifty new dance move? Some technical ballet term known only to initiates? No, in fact, "callipygian" means "having beautiful buttocks"! Well, you can see how it might come in handy! Most of us audience dwellers, however, are unfortunately afflicted by its opposite, "steatopygia", which is the condition of having excess fat on the buttocks. "Callipygian" comes to us from the Greek callos meaning beautiful (which also crops up in calligraphy) and puge, meaning buttocks.

But some ballet words do have interesting histories as well, and the first of these does, coincidentally, mean "buttocks". "Tutu" was euphemistic baby talk in 19th century French for cucu, a derivative of cul a rather coarse word for the backside. It was originally applied to the tight fitting underwear worn by dancers and then to the dress covering the underwear.

Any dancer will probably snort in derision when told that the word "adage" means "at ease". Of course, those slow flowing exercises are supposed to look easy, but as anyone knows who's tried one, the dancer is probably thinking, as one of my ballet teachers put it, "God, I HATE adage! It's so HARD!! My hips hurt!!". But indeed the word comes to us via French from the Italian "ad agio", meaning "at ease" or "at leisure".

An entrechat seems, to anyone who knows French, to mean "between the cats"; this is intriguing, because I've never seen my cats jump straight upwards and beat their little paws in the air (but then I've never seen them do a pas de chat either). In fact, "entrechat" is a French corruption of the Italian phrase capriola intrecciata meaning literally a "complicated caper". Intrecciata comes from the word treccia meaning a tress or braid, and this is a clearer image of what the legs do in an entrechat.

This leads us to the word for another type of jump, the cabriole, which seems to have nothing to do with animals, but in fact derives from the Latin word for "goat", capra. It migrated into Italian as capriola, a young goat or fawn, and from there into French as capriole or cabriole. I don't imagine any of Canada's fine dancers would appreciate being described as "goat-like", no matter how well they executed their cabrioles.

Moving on to turns, a pirouette was originally, in medieval France, a child's spinning top or hand-held windmill; the French word was derived from the Italian piro, meaning a peg or pin, and was possibly influenced by another French word, rouet, meaning a spinning wheel. The word "fouette" can be traced ultimately back to the Latin name for the beech tree, fagus, which in Old French became fou (not to be confused with the modern French word fou meaning crazy, though one might think that a more appropriate description of the movement). A fouet was a young or small beech tree and then a stick of beech wood used for beating, before finally settling down as its modern meaning "whip", which of course describes the action of the working leg in a fouette.

And finally, where does that all-purpose filler connecting dance step, the pas de bourree come from? Actually, its etymology is very appropriate, for it comes ultimately from the Latin burra, which was coarse wool used for stuffing. In French this became bourre, a bundle of twigs with such stuffing, used for bonfires. But what is the connection with dance? In 1565 a country dance from Auvergne became the rage at the French court; it was a dance traditionally performed around a bonfire and thus called a bourree.

Catherine Barber is editor of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary and a student of ballet.

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