"Bar-bar-bar."

That's what the speech of strange, foreign tribes sounded like to the ancient Greeks.

"What'd they say?" one Greek would ask another. "I dunno," the other would reply. "It was 'bar-bar-bar' to me."

Based on this aural rendering, the Greeks began calling these alien peoples "barbaros," which took on the general meaning of "foreign, ignorant" and gave us the word barbarian.

Barbarian is one of several English terms derived from the sounds of incomprehensible, inarticulate or repetitive speech. These include the imitative terms chitter-chatter, gibber-jabber and gibberish, as well as babble, which reprises the sounds made by a baby... well, not ALL the sounds made by a baby.

But surprisingly, babble is not the root of the Old Testament's Tower of Babel. True, the Lord did indeed confound the language of Babel so that no one could understand one another; (today we call this "Washington, D.C."). But the biblical Babel is derived from "Babhel," the Hebrew name for Babylon.

Another word based on the sound of unintelligible speech is rhubarb. Because this plant originated in the distant lands of the barbaros to the east, the Greeks called it "rha barbaron," literally, foreign rhubarb.

But what about the origin of the secondary meaning of rhubarb — "a heated dispute or controversy"? This term is another great example of onomatopoeia, the naming of a thing or action by a vocal imitation of the sound associated with it.

On early radio dramas, groups of studio performers recreated the sound of angry crowds by mumbling "rhubarb, rhubarb." During the 1930s, Red Barber and other radio sportscasters began using the term to describe angry altercations in baseball games, which, aptly enough, often involved barbaric language.

Speaking of which, white frontiersmen cursed so often that Native Americans called them "goddams," while French civilians during World War I referred to cussing U.S. soldiers as "les sommombiches."

According to popular legend, the term "gringo" also derives from the sound of speech. The story goes that, during the Mexican-American War, Mexicans often heard U.S. soldiers singing a line from a song by Scottish poet Robert Burns — "Green grow the rushes, O." So, they dubbed the Americans "green grows," i.e., "gringos."

It's a charming tale, but, in fact, gringo comes from the Spanish "griego," meaning Greek, as in "hablar en griego" (to talk in Greek). Or, as one barbarian might say to another, "It's Greek to me."

Rob Kyff, a teacher and writer in West Hartford, Connecticut, invites your language sightings. His book, "Mark My Words," is available for $9.99 on Amazon.com. Send your reports of misuse and abuse, as well as examples of good writing, via email to [email protected] or by regular mail to Rob Kyff, Creators Syndicate, 737 3rd Street, Hermosa Beach, CA 90254.

Photo credit: Judith Ekedi Jangwa at Unsplash