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Chimo!
& Other Greetings
Recognition of the arrival and departure of another person takes many verbal forms, and salutations spring from surprising sources. Hello, as we'll discover, began with a human imitating the howl of a hunting dog. In this sample page from Casselmania, I look at expressions of greeting and farewell in English, Italian, and Latin, but chiefly at one greeting in Canuck parlance: chimo!
On the TV series and in the movie versions of Star Trek, the Vulcan Spock says, "Live long and prosper." Ancient Romans had the somewhat abrupt ave atque vale ‘hello and goodbye,’ which always reminds me of the ditty that comedian Groucho Marx used to sing, "Hello, I must be going." The Latin is literally ‘hail and be well’ and might be the source of Spock's bye-bye. Bye-bye is a contracted and then duplicated form of goodbye, itself a centuries-in-the-making compression of "God be with you."
Ave atque Vale
The Roman Colosseum
The Romans used ave and avete by themselves for saying hello or goodbye. Later ave was a morning greeting, and vale was used when leaving someone in the evening. In classical Latin ave atque vale came to be a formulaic farewell to the dead, as in the touching obituary poem that the lyric poet Catullus addressed to his departed brother:
Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.
‘Now for all eternity, my brother, farewell.’
When the slaves and criminals who made up the ranks of Roman gladiators were about to enter the arena to almost certain eventual death—ancient Rome had few Retired Gladiator Clubs—they marched past the V.I.P. box and saluted the emperor with this formula:
Ave, Imperator, morituri te salutant.
‘Hail, Emperor, those who are about to die, wish you health.’
Darn nice of them too, when one considers they were being sacrificed only to ensure the emperor's popularity as a provider of spectacle for the Roman mob, or, in the famous phrase of the satiric poet Juvenal, as a provider of panem et circenses ‘bread and chariot races.’
Gladiators depicted in a fresco
Like ave were the classical Greek chaire and chairete which were used both on meeting and on leaving a person. Their root meaning was ‘rejoice.’
Hello
Before we examine a distinctly Canadian greeting, let's look briefly at two others: hello and ciao. Hello appears to have arisen in its first instance as an imitation by hunters of a hunting dog's yowl. It is marked "echoic" in many dictionaries, which then add its early forms like halloo from medieval French halloer ‘to pursue game with shouts and cries.’
Compare, too, the Old High German verb halôn ‘to hail a ferryman by shouting halloo across the water.’ Halloo, hullo, hello are a few of many variants which include the reduplicated hullabaloo.
Ciao !
The very informal and familiar Italian ciao can be used as a greeting or a farewell. Ciao sounds approximately like our food word chow. Ciao came into standard Italian from a Venetian dialect where ciao is a condensed variant of schiavo ‘slave’ in the longer formal greeting
schiavo suo ‘your slave,’
itself a reduction of
sono il suo schiavo, signore
‘I am your servant,sir.’
How very close to the Dickensian Victorian English greeting, "Your servant, Mr. Scrooge."
You can still hear such a greeting in Latin in the common Austrian greeting Servus! with stress on the last syllable. Servus harks back to the days of ancient Rome when slavery was in force, and slave servants had to greet their masters with the lick-spittle sibilance of servus sum ‘I am your slave.’
Chimo
A widespread and ancient Inuit greeting, chimo! may be accompanied by a gesture of salutation as well, namely moving the left hand in a circle on the area of the chest over the heart. Variants as heard by white explorers include teyma, tima, and timah. Some early explorers were told that chimo came from an Inuktitut root that referred to trade and barter and that the only greeting implied in the word when spoken to white southerners was ‘let's trade.’ Even if that is true, today chimo is exclusively a warm greeting and is used in our North as a toast before drinking.
The number of discrete sounds utterable by the human vocal apparatus is finite. Consonant and vowel repertoires vary from language to language, but it only takes learning three or four new languages, before the student begins to hear words that sound the same in two languages but have quite different meanings. I heard about such a mix-up concerning chimo from my friend, broadcaster Vicki Gabereau.
Vicki Gabereau
in CTV publicity photo
Vicki had an acquaintance who liked the cheerful sound of Chimo (chee-mo) and so this female friend named her dog Chimo. The dog was obedient and learned to respond to his name when called by his owner.
When the lady got a job in Japan that was to last several years, she did not want to be parted from her dear Chimo, and so decided to take her pet with her to Japan, which she did.
Things worked out well as Chimo had the run of a little fenced yard beside the lady's residence in quite a posh suburb near Tokyo. Now Chimo was good-natured but frisky, and occasionally jumped the fence. But the lady had only to call him by name, and eventually he would come trotting home and jump back inside the little yard.
The lady did notice that when she called him loudly, any Japanese neighbours who might be in hearing distance would turn away and avoid her. This happened every time she shouted,"Chimo! Chimo!"
Then people of the neighbourhood began crossing to the other side of the street or roadway whenever she came along. The lady was puzzled.
It was months until a Japanese friend explained that the way she pronounced chimo made it sound exactly like the Japanese word for pubic hair. She had been running up and down the street for months shouting "Pubic hair! Pubic hair!"
Her Japanese neighbours had been too polite to inquire if she was merely crazy or was experiencing a late but joyful puberty.
I promise that is the only shaggy dog story on this site.
Chimo had long tenure as a Canadian place name too. An Innu community on the Koksoak River just south of Ungava Bay was called Fort Chimo from 1831 until 1981 when the name was changed to the traditional one, Kuujjuaq. Koksoak means ‘big river’ in western Inuktitut. Would anyone go skinny-dipping in the Koksoak?
Discover a new origin of the Alberta & B.C. word hoodoo.
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