Wordwatch: Barbecue
“Now that we’re allowed to host small groups outside, those of us lucky enough to have a garden or outdoor space may be shaking out our picnic rugs and buffing our barbeque tongs in anticipation of a summer of al fresco entertaining.” – Debrett’s promotion, June 2020.
Here’s a measure of the extent to which popular culture dictates “correct” culture – dumbing-down, as we used to call it, when we were conscious of such distinctions. I’ve no quarrel with picnic-rugs and al fresco dining. It’s those “barbeque tongs” that worry me. No, not “barbecue”, but “barbeque”. “Barbecue” is where we must start. It’s a word with an interesting history. It seems to have come from Haiti and Guiana, via Spain, or even Portugal: barbacoa, which sounds very like Portuguese to me. It signified a wooden construction – “a rude framework” – on which meat was laid out to be cured or dried. The framework might also be of iron, and used to support meat, often whole animals, for roasting. In a different context it could function as a bedstead, and the word can also mean a surface on which coffee beans were dried. It entered the language at the time of the extensive exploration of the Americas, and is recorded from the late seventeenth century.
But “barbeque”? I’m afraid it’s a phonetic mistake of the same order as “barbe à queue” which was once proposed as the (French) origin of “barbecue”, and dismissed by the OED as “an absurd conjecture suggested merely by the sound of the word”. That it is a phonetic error is clear from the fact that the substitution of “q” for “c” produces a form alien to the English language, in which “qu” is always pronounced as a consonant, equivalent either to “k” or “kw” (as in “toque” or “equivalent”). It never incorporates the value of a consonant followed by a vowel, as in Arabic “Q’ran”. “Barbeque” – it’s obvious – should properly be pronounced “barbeck”.
Its spelling with a “q” may be a result, not so much of ignorance as a wish to render the word more fun. It’s a long way from the old connotations of tribal feasting or ritual cooking, and lends itself to the snappy abbreviation “BBQ” which has come over from America with the summer weather every year this century, and for a while before that. The Debrett’s editor to whom I mentioned the solecism says that she understood the spelling with “q” to be British English, that with “c” to be American. That is odd: the “q” spelling comes from the U.S.A. and her misapprehension inadvertently underlines the point that it’s not a question of geography: one spelling is correct, the other a popular distortion. “Barbeque” isn’t in any of the dictionaries I’ve consulted.
To see Debrett’s, publisher of the Peerage and Baronetage, descending to the level of the imported vernacular makes one wonder where we’re all going. Debrett’s exists to keep us up to the social mark, and has of late years embraced the mission to educate those not already well-bred by the issue of books of etiquette. I for one couldn’t care less if the purveyors of spare ribs and ketchup marinaded in acrid smoke choose to use the “q” spelling, but if Debrett’s doesn’t set an example by using the correct orthography, who will? (The editor has kindly informed me that she will take my remonstrance to heart for the future.)
The misspelling of “barbecue” by Debrett’s, of all people, first of all obscures its romantic origins as a word, and makes it almost unpronounceable to anyone who can spell. It also risks passing on to a new generation a shallow and ill-informed understanding of the concept. And who would want to render the idea of a nice summer barbecue shallow and ill-informed?