Steam Engines and Owls

We heard on the TV news recently that the first newly built steam locomotive since the 1940s, costing some three million pounds, has been shown to the public by York Railway Museum. Good news for those of us oldies who treasure memories of the sight, sound and smell of the pre-diesel and pre-electric railway engines. I remember how, as a small boy, I spent a night at the station hotel at Leeds ready to be seen off on a train journey early next morning, and was woken by the ceaseless symphony of railway station sounds, the rattling of the couplings, the occasional steam whistle and the rapid ch-ch-ch of the steam escaping as wheels of departing trains span for a moment as they got a grip on the track. It must have been at about that time that my brother and I were shown over a long-established railway engine factory at York or Leeds - though one thing I do recall is that diesel-powered engines were being built there and were something of a novelty.

‘Locomotive’ first appeared as an adjective meaning ‘moving about’, or ‘travelling’. Someone in the seventeenth century had coined the word from Latin elements, moveo/mot-- = to move, and locus = place, position. The noun ‘locomotive’ is a shortening of the early nineteenth-century phrase ‘locomotive engine’ meaning a ‘machine that can move about’. The further abbreviation ‘loco’ came into use in the late nineteenth century (a close parallel to the emergence of our term ‘zoo’ for ‘zoological gardens’).

USA ‘loco’ meaning ‘barmy’, ‘off his rocker’, ‘crazy’ may be derived from Spanish or Italian, according to which authority you choose to follow: in either case, the derivation would at first seem to be from L locus, though the semantics would be unclear. Tony Thorne, in his Dictionary of Contemporary Slang, tells us that the word is Spanish and comes from ‘L ulucus = owl’. I can’t trace any such Latin word, but there is a L ulula = screech-owl: and Eric Partridge in his etymological dictionary Origins refers to Sanskrit ulukas = owl. Funny how owls can at the same time serve as images of wisdom and images of insanity. I suppose they are not unique in looking wise but sounding demented.

Steam Engines and Owls