Pirate pejorative

Is it good to be swarthy?

By Jan Freeman  |  June 3, 2007

Shiver me timbers! Are those Caribbean pirates, after three bold raids on our time and money, now making off with the standard meaning of swarthy?

Reader Scott Jones fears that it may be so. "I've always used swarthy to mean 'having dark skin, dusky,' which is the dictionary definition," he e-mailed. But some people, he recently found, think swarthy has a more sinister cast. When he polled friends and colleagues, they offered synonyms like "shady, greasy, untrustworthy, sketchy, or pirate-like." (That's sketchy in the slang sense, "strange" or "suspect," not the older meaning, "lacking detail.")

"My boyfriend says that if a majority of people understand the definition of a word to be 'A,' then that is the definition of the word," he adds. "But I'm not willing to give up on swarthy."

Should we send out a rescue party? Not yet, says lexicographer Erin McKean, so long as your friends are only using this sense of swarthy in speech. But "if a majority of people believe a word means X, and commit it to writing, lexicographers will find it," she warns, and the definition will change.

Don't run up the white flag yet, though: That's not necessarily where swarthy is headed. Sure, it can be a disparaging word, as it was when Ann Coulter, doing some post-9/11 rabble-rousing, called for airport searches of all "suspicious-looking swarthy men." (Not just Middle Easterners, she explained later, but also, "you know, Italians, Spanish, Jews.")

And even Disney's wide-screen buccaneers (swarthy, like all pirates, thanks to their outdoor profession) are outlaws, reinforcing the association between dusky skin and shady behavior.

Still, swarthy is not in itself an insulting or a taboo term. In fact, in its earlier centuries, when it was just swart (the ending was added in the 1500s), it was not applied to complexions: In the Beowulf poet's "swart night," Chaucer's "swart red," and Sir Walter Scott's "swarthy hair," the adjective means simply "dark."

Even when it was applied to skin color, from the 14th century on, swarthy was a fluid term, apparently meaning nothing more specific than "darker than the writer's tribe." A Google Books search finds 19th-century English writers describing all sorts of people as swarthy: "Our Norman ancestors were a dark-haired and swarthy people," one writes, as were the Celts. And to Ben Franklin, in 1751, the German immigrants we know as Pennsylvania Dutch were "swarthy" invaders of what was then an English colony.

Swarthy was also used, not surprisingly, in the condescending, stereotypical way that everyone but Ann Coulter would now call offensive. "Let our Roman eagles fly/ On swarthy Egypt," Ben Jonson wrote. To English writers, Gypsies, Hindus, and Mexicans were members of "the swarthy races"; the Pueblo Indian, wrote one, was "the swarthy pagan whose gods are as numerous and as varied as are his needs."

Though the context makes those uses pejorative, there could be another influence, McKean notes: "The OED has a figurative negative meaning for swarthy," now poetic, meaning "wicked, baleful, malignant." There are citations for this swarthy from the ninth century (the poet Cynewulf's sweartra synna, "black sin") to the 19th (Emerson's "swart chagrin").

I'll go out on a plank, though, and predict that the pejorative swarthy is not gaining speed, despite a temporary revival brought on by political hyperbole and wide-screen swashbuckling.

In fact, the recent evidence hints that if swarthy is going anywhere, it's toward a more favorable sense. Looking at its use in US newspapers over the past five years, I found a generous handful of novel uses where swarthy seems to mean hearty, rich, gutsy, strong, maybe even macho.

Reviewing a performance of "Carmina Burana" last year, a Chicago Tribune writer said "the men launched into 'Fortune plango vulnera' ('I lament the wounds that fortune deals') with swarthy vehemence."

In the Globe a few months ago, food writer Lisa Yockelson wrote that her chocolate drop cookie combined "the swarthy style of a brownie square or bar" with "the luxury of a dense chocolate cake."

In the Washington Post, Michael Dirda said, "Nowadays, comics have grown up and taken steroids: They are swarthy, mean, perverse, complex, adult." And at Beeradvocate.com, a reviewer described a brew called Old Crustacean as "a swarthy beer, sea worthy."

There were even men boasting of their swarthiness. In the New York Times, Tommy Chong (of Cheech and Chong fame), asked to describe himself, said he was "incredibly handsome. Kind of dark, swarthy, and incredibly fit." The young playwright Paul Baumbasch likes the word too: he's "rakish" and "very swarthy," he told a Washington Post interviewer.

So if swarthy does get a new dictionary definition anytime soon, it may well be a better one. And should you want to drink to the salvation of swarthy, what could be more fitting than a foaming mug of Old Crustacean?

E-mail Jan Freeman at freeman@globe.com. For the Word blog, go to boston.com/ideas/brainiac/word.