Tattoo (pronounced ta-too)
(1) A signal on a drum, bugle, or trumpet at
night, for soldiers or sailors to go to their quarters.
(2) A knocking or strong pulsation.
(3) In British military tradition, an outdoor
military pageant or display, conducted usually at night.
(4) The act or practice of marking the skin with
indelible patterns, pictures, legends, etc, by making punctures in it and
inserting pigments.
(5) A pattern, picture, legend, etc so made.
1570–1580: An evolution from the earlier taptoo from the Dutch command tap toe! (in the literature also as taptoe) (literally “the tap(room) is to”
(ie shut)). Originally, the tattoo was a
signal on a drum, bugle, or trumpet at night, for soldiers or sailors to go to
their quarters, the musical form varying between regiments but all based on a knocking
or strong pulsation; it was later it became an outdoor, usually nocturnal military
pageant or display
The word was first used during the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) in the Low Countries (Belgium and the Netherlands) where the Dutch fortresses were garrisoned by a federal army containing Scottish, English, German and Swiss mercenaries commanded by a Dutch officer corps. Drummers from the garrison were sent into the towns at 21:30 (9:30 pm) each evening to inform the soldiers that it was time to return to barracks. The process was known as doe den tap toe (Dutch for "turn off the tap"), an instruction to innkeepers to stop serving beer and send the soldiers home for the night although the drummers continued to play until the curfew at 22:00 (10:00 pm). Tattoo and the earlier tap-too and taptoo, are alterations of the Dutch words tap toe which have the same meaning. Taptoo was the earlier used alteration of the phrase and a reference was found in George Washington's papers: "In future the Reveille will beat at day-break; the troop at 8 in the morning; the retreat at sunset and taptoo at nine o'clock in the evening." Over the years, the process became more of a show and often included the playing of the first post at 21:30 and the last post at 22:00. Bands and displays were included and shows were often conducted by floodlight or searchlight. Tattoos were commonplace in the late nineteenth century with most military and garrison towns putting on some kind of show or entertainment during the summer months.
The use to describe body
marking dates from 1760–1770. Tattoo,
from the Marquesan tatu or the Samaon
& Tahitian tatau (to strike)
coming to replace the earlier tattow
from the Polynesian tatau. It took some time for tattoo to become the
standardised western spelling, the OED noting the eighteenth century currency
of both tattaow and tattow.
Before the adoption of the Polynesian word, the practice of tattooing
had been described in the West as painting, scarring or staining and in 1900 British
anthropologist Ling Roth in documented four methods of skin marking, suggesting
they be differentiated under the names tatu,
moko, cicatrix and keloid. There was, between the Dutch and the British,
a minor colonial spat about which deserves the credit for importing the word to
Europe.
In Japanese, the word irezumi means "insertion of ink" and is applied variously to tattoos using tebori (the traditional Japanese hand method, a Western-style machine or any method of tattooing using insertion of ink. The most common word used for traditional Japanese tattoo designs is horimono although increasingly the word tattoo is used to describe non-Japanese styles of tattooing. Etymologists found tattoo intriguing because so many languages contain similar words, some appearing to have emerged independently of the others and anthropologists agree the practice of tapping on primitive instruments as a distractive device seems to have been a widespread practice while images were being made on the skin, the conclusion being some of the variations are likely onomatopoeic.
No comments:
Post a Comment