swallow

Sometimes you’re in the garden and you notice a swallowtail butterfly and you’re suddenly beset with the curiosity of why swallow refers to both a bird and a physical act. Could there possibly be a connection?

There could be, but there’s not. The verb swallow goes back to the Old English swelgan, “swallow, imbibe, absorb,” likely descending from the Proto-Indo European root *swel-, meaning “to eat or drink,” which also gives us words like swell and swelter. The bird swallow referred to the same forked-tail animal going back to Proto-Germanic, hence cognates in Swedish, Danish and German It probably descends from the Proto-Indo European *swol-wi-, which also gives Russian, Polish and Slovak their words for “nightingale.”

And if you’re curious, it’s the swallow’s forked tail that makes the connection to butterflies with similarly forked wings. I’m not sure if it actually exists in real life or what its proper name would be, but in the video game Chrono Chross, the main hero fights with a weapon called a swallow. It’s basically two blades attached to opposite ends of a pole, so the reference is obviously to the forked tail again, but googling around only got me results for sword-swallowing.

I wonder what this oar-shaped weapon is actually called? I looked it up and in the Japanese version of the game, it’s just called スワロー or suwarō — basically the English name rendered in katakana.