Folk Etymology and Earliest Documented Usage of "Calypso"

Abstract

In the Carnival Issue of the Trinidad Sunday Mirror (A 6-Legged Killer Made Calypso, Feb. 9, 1964, p. 6), long-ago judge of contests, music-lover R. E. Legge added still another derivation for the term calypso the eight I listed in 1959 (Toward a Definition of 'Calypso,' Ethnomusicology, 111/2, May, 1959, 59-60, summarized in Trinidad and Tobago Index, I, Summer, 1965, 10-12). In Mr. Algernon's words (and punctuation), It started with the way Trinidadians speak-the long-time Trinidadians who had a strong streak of Spanish in them. If, today, you think a man is talking nonsense, you might ask him up. The Trinidadian of that day-around the turn of the century-would tell him: Keep low. Naturally, he'd say this in Spanish, which came out something like calle so, the first part being pronounced rhyme with buy. During the improvised free-forall picong sessions toward the end of the show a tent, the frontrunning chantrel would sing out so! Calle so! Meaning, of course, up, keep low, you're singing nonsense! So it was easy for Trinidadians accept the picong cry of calle-so as apt description of those popular picong songs. That's how they came, gradually, be known as Calle-so, then Kaiso. Algernon credits the late Mr. Sa Gomes, prominent Port-of-Spain record dealer, with the borrowing of the spelling Calypso from an insecticide famous for putting bachacs (parasol ants, Eciton) flight (my derivation No. 5), because ... shrewd businessman that he was, he decided that the songs be recorded should be hot, exciting, full of fire . . . songs that could do things people. While the metaphor comparing musical insult insecticide would occur few non-calypsonians (or Portuguese record dealers), calle-so, from Spanish callar, to be silent, and the Creole-English intensifier so, may at least be authentic Trinidad idiom. My favorite Trinidadian informant reports Venezuelan-raised East Indian children using calle su boca, shut your mouth, in Rio Claro in 1930, and the largest Spanish-English dictionaries translate so as whoa, alternative source the common intensifier mentioned above. A Spanish colony for over 300 years, Trinidad has always had considerable numbers of Spanish-speakers, locals in the Lopinot Valley and Caura area, and Venezuelan refugees and students in Town. Furthermore, the close connection of music with Venezuelan castillan and paseo or pasillo dance tunes is commonly recognized. But like all other folk etymologies, this one fails square with all the evidence, in this case the early use of similar terms in such non-Hispanic islands as St. Thomas and St. Lucia.