fantoosh – podictionary 625
Oct 22nd, 2007 | 
The podictionary word for today is…well, I’ll let him say it.
“Hello, this is Alexander McCall Smith and my favorite word is fantoosh. That’s spelt F A N T O O S H.”
Alexander McCall Smith is the author of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series as well as several others including The Sunday Philosophy Club series. I really enjoy his work. I think it’s happy and wise, simple and sophisticated all at the same time. That’s why I was thrilled when he agreed to have me do an episode on his favorite word.
At least I was thrilled until I heard the word.
Fantoosh; I’ve never heard of that. What’s more the Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam Webster and the American Heritage Dictionary have never heard of it either. So I popped fantoosh into Google and came up with the Fantoosh Restaurant in Glasgow. Glasgow is in Scotland and Alexander McCall Smith lives in Scotland so I called up the restaurant to see what their name meant:
“I’m not too sure what it means exactly. We’ve actually had a few people from Spain or Italy come in; they actually were laughing at the name of our shop but they wouldn’t tell us what it meant because in their country it means something rude.”
Well, it’s not that rude actually. In Italian and French too the word or a very similar one means “marionette” or “puppet.” But that’s not a puppet as you’d see in a puppet show; it’s a person who is easy to push around, someone with no will of their own.
It evolved in the sixteenth century in Italian out of the word for “manservant.” It’s etymologically related to the Latin infans, an ancestor also of our infant and with a meaning ultimately of “one who can’t speak.” I guess with the Italian and French meaning it’s one who can’t speak for themselves.
But I don’t think if someone was going to name a restaurant Fantoosh they’d want to name it as a place that has no will of its own. And it seems odd that Alexander McCall Smith, who I’d guess is a pretty up-beat kind of person, would pick as his favorite word something that basically means a “yes-man” or a “pushover.”
So aren’t we lucky that the Dictionary of the Scots Language exists, because it has an entry for fantoosh that makes far more sense. They say it means “over-dressed”, “flashy”, “showy” or “ultra-fashionable.” They have citations back to 1947 but they believe the word arose during the First World War, that it is indeed etymologically related to the “puppet” fantouche and an English dialect word fanty-sheeny that I found mysteriously attributed to Devon (which is about as far away from Scotland as you can get and still be in the British Isles).
I also found fantoosh meaning “fancy”, “extravagant”, and “frivolous” in the Double-Tongued Dictionary that’s run by Grant Barrett of A Way With Words.
But wait a minute; there are reader’s comments there too. The first one says:
You can also find the word used in The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, where there is a reference to the “fantouche Republic of Bophuthatswana.”
Now that’s an odd coincidence.
I mean, it shouldn’t seem like an odd coincidence that the author who told me that this was his favorite word, actually used it in one of his books. What’s odd is that the Republic of Bophuthatswana was anything but showy or ultra-fashionable. The Republic of Bophuthatswana was a puppet government of the government of South Africa before the end of apartheid.
So here Alexander McCall Smith is using the word with a meaning of a marionette with no will of its own; its Italian or French meaning (with a near French spelling by the way). Two pretty rare words, both with direct links back to the same author. At a glance you might think that the two words are different, but the dictionaries tell me they’re related.
I wonder if Alexander McCall Smith is being fantoosh with his vocabulary, or if he’s playing me for a fantouche
