Head first
CHIPMUNK, n. In case you don’t live in an area of North America or Siberia where these small mammals, genus Tamias, can be found, here is a picture of Tamias striatus, the Eastern chipmunk.
These cute little rodents are all over my yard and sometimes they make a kind of sharp, staccato sound that could be transcribed as “chip,” and I guess my naive past self assumed the sound was the origin of their name and didn’t think too hard about the rest of the word. Chip, okay, but why “munk”?
I’d been saying “chipmunk” my whole life without questioning it. Sometimes you see a word that breaks nicely into pieces that seem like they could mean something, but they don’t. You can break “carpet” into “car” and “pet,” and that tells you exactly nothing about what “carpet” actually means. (For the curious, “carpet” is related to “carpe diem,” since both come from the Latin verb carpere, meaning pluck/pick/harvest.) Carpets and chipmunks have something in common: the words can’t be broken down any further. “Chip” and “munk” are meaningless here, at least if we stick to English.
Like many North American animal and plant names, the origin of “chipmunk” comes from Indigenous languages. Wikipedia says it might be from “jidmoonh” in Odawa (Ottawa), and The Online Etymology Dictionary says it might be from “ajidamoo” in Ojibwe. These are closely related languages and both “jidmoonh” and “ajidamoo” actually refer to red squirrels (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus) and not chipmunks (Tamias striatus). Probably there was a related term for chipmunks in an extinct Algonquian language of what is now New England. Because of this loss, we will never know for sure.
Both “jidmoonh” and “ajidamoo” literally mean “head first,” describing the animals’ way of running down tree trunks. Ajid/jid means “upside down.” Chipmunk is sometimes a character in Indigenous folklore, and there is a wonderful Iroquois legend about Chipmunk and Bear. This vision of Chipmunk as a reckless, speak-before-thinking kind of animal really fits with the run-down-a-tree-head-first naming scheme. If you would like to hear an Ojibwe speaker pronounce “ajidamoo,” here is a link. The connection between “ajidamoo” and “chipmunk” is a little clearer out loud.
European settler colonists were bad at many things, including identifying new animals and understanding/transcribing Indigenous languages, which could explain the semantic shift from “red squirrel” to “chipmunk” and the phonetic differences. When people hear foreign words, they often try to make them sound more like familiar words, so the English word “chipmunk” gets to be spelled that way by proximity/influence from words like chip and mink.
One last note on how we name animals after their behavior: the scientific name for chipmunks, the genus Tamias, comes from a Greek word that means “treasurer, steward, or housekeeper,” and it refers to how chipmunks collect and store food for winter. So they’re reckless in some ways, but careful in others.
Let’s run headlong into some of the books I have stored up for this newsletter, chipmunk-like.
This week (month) in things that are not quite Capital-R Romance but still have a lot of French words in them, I read Susanna Forrest’s ongoing series of essays about the stunt horsewomen of 19th-c Paris, and am now predictably enamored of the idea of incorporating these daredevils into a romance novel. Forrest is writing a book about these women and I can’t wait to read it. Similarly, I am also reading and loving Summer Brennan’s essays on 19th-c French courtesans.
Over the past four weeks, here’s some of what I’ve read in small-r romance (there’s more, but we’ll have to come back to the other titles in future newsletters):
Sing Anyway (cis f/nonbinary, both bi/pan/queer, contemporary, novella) by Anita Kelly. This stars a shy nonbinary academic in their 40s and a stylish, creative fat woman with a beautiful singing voice. She is their karaoke crush! As a person who, prepandemic, frequented a weird queer karaoke bar very much like Moonie's, this story made me ache for the joyful camaraderie of strangers. If you go to karaoke in the same place regularly, you start to see the same people, and you know them without knowing them, and it's easy to develop crushes on particular singers, so this is a genius premise for a romance. I also loved how this novella addressed bodies and clothing and gender presentation. Lily talks about how hard it was to find clothes that fit right and made her feel good as a fat person, so she started making her own, and Sam talks about how they haven't been out as nonbinary for long and they're still not quite sure what kind of clothes will make them feel like their best self, and the two of them connect over that. It was really lovely. It’s also hot. The whole novella felt just right to me—rich and full and complete but still a quick read. Looking forward to reading more of Anita Kelly’s writing. Content guidance: sex, some discussion of body image.
One Last Stop (bi f/lesbian f, both cis, contemporary, time travel) by Casey McQuiston. This is an adorable, quirky story about falling in love with a stranger on the subway and then discovering said stranger has actually been stranded out of time since 1977 and can’t leave the train. Everyone is in their early twenties and kind of a disaster, which, y’know, fair. Content guidance from the author.
In things that are neither Romance nor romance, I also read Dawnie Walton’s novel The Final Revival of Opal & Nev and Nghi Vo’s novella When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain. On the surface these two works don’t have a lot in common, since one is the transcribed oral history of a fictional proto-punk duo made up of a white British man and a Black American woman and the other is a secondary-world fantasy about talking, shapeshifting tigers, but they’re both fascinated with storytelling and stories within stories. In The Final Revival of Opal & Nev, the journalist chronicling the story of the band and the brutal riot/lynching that tore them apart must also tell her own story, interrupting the interviews with editor’s notes to explain her role in the affair and the threats she’s subject to along the way. In When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, the traveling monk who encounters the tigers must tell a story to their satisfaction or risk being eaten. Stories that think about themselves as stories immediately win my heart and I loved both of these. Opal & Nev in particular was an enthralling, twisty, up-past-your-bedtime read and I really loved Opal.
Whew, okay. I’m back. See you all next Sunday!
