The Words of Sugar

Goal: After this lesson you can trace the word "sugar" and its trade vocabulary, and explain what those words quietly reveal about where sugar came from. Subject: English Language Arts | Run time: about 7 minutes

Quick recall

Last time we looked at the hidden costs of cheap sugar. Two quick questions. One: about how much does sugar cost the United States in health spending each year? Around 190 billion dollars a year (Mintz, 1985). Two: what does the U.S. sugar program do to the price you pay? It keeps domestic sugar prices above world prices (Mintz, 1985).

Why this matters

Say the word "sugar" out loud. It feels like an ordinary English word. It is not. It is a traveler. That single word carries a route stamped into it, from India, through the Arab world, into Europe, and finally into your kitchen. And it is not alone. A whole little vocabulary rode the same ships, and each word is a fossil of the trade that made it.

The idea

Start with the word itself. "Sugar" begins in Sanskrit as sharkara, in India (Mintz, 1985). It moves into Arabic as sukkar, as the crop and the craft of refining spread across the Middle East (Mintz, 1985). Then it passes into Old French as sucre, and from there into English (Mintz, 1985). So the path of the word is the path of the thing: India to the Middle East to Europe. The word is a map. Now the trade words. Muscovado comes from the Portuguese mascavado, which means "unfinished" (Mintz, 1985). It was a colonial trade term for raw, unrefined sugar, the dark stuff shipped out before any European factory cleaned it up. Hear the bias in it. "Unfinished" treats the finished product as the European version, as if the work done in the islands did not count as finishing. Molasses comes from the Portuguese melaço, meaning "honey-like" (Mintz, 1985). It is the thick, dark syrup left behind when sugar is processed, a byproduct named for its sweetness even though it was the leftover. Rum is the drink distilled from that byproduct. One possible origin is the old word rumbullion, English slang for "tumult" or uproar (Mintz, 1985). The language of colonial alcohol, made from sugar's leftovers, carries noise and disorder right in its root. And then there is hogshead, an English maritime term, a unit of trade measure (Mintz, 1985). A hogshead of sugar held about 1,000 to 1,200 pounds (Mintz, 1985). It is a shipping word, a barrel word. People did not talk about sugar by the spoonful here. They talked about it by the ton, the way you talk about cargo. Put these words in a row and a pattern jumps out. Sharkara, sukkar, sucre, muscovado, molasses, rum, hogshead. This is not the vocabulary of a garden. It is the vocabulary of a trade route, a refinery, and a ship's hold. The everyday words of sugar are a fossil record of the system that moved it.

Picture it

Picture the word "sugar" as a passport stamped at three borders. First stamp, India, where it is sharkara. Second stamp, the Arab world, where it becomes sukkar. Third stamp, France, where it turns into sucre, then slips across to English. Now picture the dock at the end of that journey. Stacked there are wooden barrels marked muscovado, "unfinished." Beside them, casks of molasses, the "honey-like" leftover, and bottles of rum, the drink born from "tumult." A clerk counts it all in hogsheads, a thousand pounds at a time. Every label on that dock is a word that traveled the route with the cargo.

Remember this

The fact to carry out: the word "sugar" traveled from Sanskrit sharkara to Arabic sukkar to Old French sucre, tracing the spread from India to the Middle East to Europe, and the trade words around it (muscovado, molasses, rum, hogshead) record the colonial system that produced it (Mintz, 1985). When you read for word origins, you are reading history that hid inside language.

Quick check

Quick check. What does the origin of "muscovado" tell us about how Europeans saw island-made sugar? Muscovado comes from the Portuguese for "unfinished," so the word treats raw island sugar as incomplete and the European refining as the real finishing, which shows the bias built into the trade vocabulary (Mintz, 1985).

Key Takeaways

The word "sugar" traveled from Sanskrit sharkara to Arabic sukkar to Old French sucre, tracing its spread from India to the Middle East to Europe (Mintz, 1985).
Muscovado, from the Portuguese for "unfinished," was a colonial term for raw, unrefined sugar (Mintz, 1985).
Molasses, from the Portuguese for "honey-like," named the dark syrup left over from processing (Mintz, 1985).
A hogshead was a trade measure holding about 1,000 to 1,200 pounds of sugar, and rum may trace to "rumbullion," meaning tumult (Mintz, 1985).
The everyday vocabulary of sugar is a fossil of the trade route and the system that built it.

Sources

Mintz, S. W. (1985). Sweetness and power: The place of sugar in modern history. Penguin Books.