castor — a beaver
castor — the Spanish cognate of the same meaning
I recently visited Agate Fossil Beds National Monument with my daughter who is one year away from becoming a full-fledged paleontologist — to read about our trip, click here: Agate and other fossil stops
While we were there, I read about and saw a film about these ancient corkscrew-shaped burrows that were discovered at Agate in 1891.
They turned out to be the burrows of the Palaeocastor. A Palaeocastor is an extinct type of beaver. As soon as I heard the name of the animal, I said to my daughter that it was a beaver. She was surprised that I knew that, but then I told her that “castor” is the Spanish word for “beaver,” so it was a logical guess on my part. A guess that turned out to be correct, by the way, and a guess that allowed me to impress my scientific, soon-to-be-paleontologist daughter.
I, on the other hand, was surprised to learn that the scientific familial name for beavers is Castoridae, so I decided to check to see if the word “castor” exists in English for “beaver.”
It does! The first definition for the word is “beaver.”
All those years that I taught Spanish, and I never knew that the word “castor” in Spanish had an exact cognate in English because we never use it. In English, we have stayed true to our language and preserved a variation of an Old English word (beofor) which, over time, has become “beaver” in Modern English.
“Castor,” on the other hand, came into Spanish from Latin (and Latin took the word from Greek), and since Latin is the base of Spanish, it makes sense that they still use “castor.”
I’ll be honest with you here about something — due to the fact that I taught dirty-minded teenagers for thirty years, I often avoided the word “beaver” completely because of its unfortunate association with a certain part of a woman’s anatomy. If I’d known that I could have forced the English word “castor” upon them and simply had them learn that “castor” meant “castor,” I would have done that, and more of my students would have become familiar not only with the Spanish word for “beaver” but also for the much-less problematic English word of “castor.”
And, in case you were wondering (even a teeny bit), no, castor oil does NOT come from beavers. It comes from castor beans, which are “the very poisonous” seeds of castor-oil plants. Poisonous? Hmmm. I’ve never taken castor oil, nor do I plan to start.
I will, however, start to call them castor dams instead of beaver dams. Will you join me?
Until next time. Share this with anyone you know who might enjoy learning new words or expanding their knowledge about words.
Tammy Marshall
Castor