Words skip across borders duty-free, importing ideas without a customs stamp. All English speakers think daily in contraband, even those who would rather not. “Zeitgeist” didn’t start out English. Neither did “laissez-faire.”
There’s a word in the zeitgeist that illustrates the point, in fact – one that has been threatening the laissez-faire consensus in North American economics. It is Donald Trump’s “most beautiful word in the dictionary”: tariff.
In Canada especially, it is the word on everyone’s lips. The U.S. president-elect – who loses that softening suffix on Monday – is threatening 25-per-cent tariffs on all Canadian imports when he takes office, unless Canada stops the alleged torrent of illegal drugs and migrants from our country into his.
But even “tariff” is smuggled goods. From the Middle East, no less. The red-white-and-blue American dictionary Merriam-Webster lays out the etymology, and it tells a story of slippery transactions, linguistic and financial – a story of free trade. A story without tariffs.
The word had made scattered appearances in English literature as early as the 1590s, but 18th-century Britain is when our modern world, and our modern use of the word tariff, began. It’s when people really started going to coffee shops, reading newspapers, minting celebrities, thinking like consumers, forming political parties, and writing proper dictionaries.
After appearing in a compilation of slang from 1699, “tariff” finally found its way into the granddaddy of English lexicography a few decades later. Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755, was a mammoth work of solo scholarship, nine years in the making, and sweated out in a state of self-flagellating procrastination by one of the most eccentric and brilliant minds of his generation.
Dr. Johnson was a scrofulous, depressive, overweight and almost violently witty man of letters who hammered out classic poems, biographies, and essays when his black moods didn’t swallow him up. He was prone to odd tics and compulsive behaviours, like tapping every lamp post he passed with his walking stick and doubling back if he missed one — probably good instincts for someone compiling the most thorough compendium of English.
Dr. Johnson defined “tariff,” with typical piquancy, as a “cartel of commerce.” (His entry for “patron” is similarly barbed: “a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.”) The passionate Tory may have been taking a shot at the rival Whigs for their use of tariffs to raise money for foreign wars and protect the new class of manufacturers.
For all the thundering authority of his entry — and the Dictionary goes on to quote a more familiar and literal account of tariff’s meaning as a “declaration of the duties of import and export” – Dr. Johnson’s etymology is less sure-footed. “Perhaps a Spanish word,” he ventures.
The great man was right to be uncertain. Modern scholars have traced tariff’s path along a different route, starting in a part of the world that Donald Trump, the word’s greatest champion, has always stigmatized. Today we know that the word “ta’rif” comes from the medieval Arabic for notification or information, and took on its current significance when merchants were notified of the duties to be paid on goods entering a foreign port.
The Middle Ages were a golden age of Arab trade. Muslim dynasties with lands rimming the Mediterranean from Barcelona to Cyprus shaped the commercial vernacular of Europe. It’s how we get the words “jar”, “zero”, and maybe even “average”, sometimes traced to the Arabic word for damaged merchandise. Most delightfully, tabby cats seem to owe their name to the Attabiyah neighbourhood in Baghdad, famous for producing beautiful silk textiles.
“Tariff” fits snugly into this tradition. Sicilian sources started using the word “tariffa” for import taxes in the 14th century, and from there the word migrated to France as “tarif”, which still means fare in modern French. It was only a day’s sailing across the English Channel to reach the pages of Johnson’s dictionary.
For all the freewheeling mercantile exchange behind this lexical evolution, the history of the word “tariff” can also be made to tell a story of economic power — who imposes what on whom. The way stations on the word’s journey tend to be societies with sway: medieval caliphates, Renaissance Italy, the France of the Louis, Pitt the Elder’s Britain, and now Trump’s America.
It’s happening again — how we use the word “tariff” being conditioned by the dominant power in global affairs. Language is a smuggler, and the history of tariffs is living proof. But a new U.S. president is here to remind us that language can also be a cudgel.