| A couple of weeks ago I came across a word in Sinhala that intrigued me. The book I’m reading now is a novel set in a remote village, where the government has just built a new office. The office has a toilet, but since there’s no running water in the village, there’s a water tank, and it is going to be filled by a “bowsaraya.” That didn’t sound to me like a Sinhala word, and when I looked it up on the dictionary app on my phone, it translated it as “bowser.” So, though I had never heard of it before, evidently “bowser” was some kind of English word. From Wikipedia I learned that Bowser is a character in Super Mario Brothers. It seemed unlikely that had anything to do with the use in this book, but I searched again and found this: “The term bowser is used by water companies in the United Kingdom to refer to mobile water tanks deployed to distribute fresh water in emergencies where the normal system of piped distribution has broken down or is insufficient. “ So in the UK “Bowser” means water truck, and that explains how the word came to Sri Lanka, back when it was the British colony of Ceylon. But where did the English word come from? It turns out that the story begins in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where a man named Sylvanus Bowser invented a kerosene pump in 1885. He then went on to patent a gasoline pump in 1905, and for many years Bowser pumps were the standard at American filling stations. Even though the term “bowser” has fallen out of use in the US, it is still used for filling station pumps in Australia. From being used for gas pumps, “bowser” came to refer to fuel tanker trucks, and they are still called that at many airports. Finally, the term was extended to water tanker trucks, which is how it got into the book I’m reading. If the name “Bowser” sounds familiar, it may be because the current mayor of Washington DC is named Muriel Bowser, and she is mentioned in the news fairly often. But where does this name “Bowser” come from originally? Hanks and Hodges’ excellent Dictionary of Surnames tells me that Bowser is a nickname which goes back to the Norman French form of address beau sire, meaning “fine sir”. The nickname would have been given to someone who said that phrase very often. So the hole I dived into with my curiosity about the funny word in Sinhala has led me in the end to an Englishman a thousand years ago walking down the road and greeting everyone he meets as “beau sire”. |
| Created on 22 December 2020, updated on 7 March 2021 by Samuel Ethan Fox |