the beauty of bilingualism is that it widens and helps customise our cultural vocabularies. it takes a lot (like a LOT) for new words, especially indigenous words, to make it into the popular lexicon, but when they do it always makes our expression more modern, more useful, more inclusive and affirming. and it’s cool.
the word for tattoo (tatu) is Polynesian because before the colonisation of the Pacific, tattooing was so narrowly practiced in modern Europe and especially Britain that there wasn’t a single word for it, and it generally was the colonial willingness to kidnap and display indigenous people for profit (and eventually the Maori/Polynesian willingness to travel to Britain voluntarily) that boosted the tattoo’s popularity as an art form and created a unified concept of what tattooing “was”. this was especially the case with Cook’s travels in the Pacific, as it coincided with the boom in popularity across all classes in Europe that followed the invention of the tattoo machine and the influence of expanding/advancing print media, which specifically spread the images of Polynesian tattoos and allowed journalists to shape narratives around what tattoos were and where they came from. before that, the english used a range of words like “marked”, “pricked”, “decorated”, etc to describe tattoos and their bearers
and from there, the rest is racism (and classism), because the myth spread through Britain/British-colonial societies that tattooing hadn’t been practiced at all in Europe before colonialism and it spread to the UK and that it spread via sailors and rose up via the lower classes, and since then every decade since the 1870s has featured a new form of moral panic about tattoos being “newly popular”, spread through the sensationalist media (which is controlled by the rich, still)
all that history in just one little word. no wonder racists want to erase indigenous language in their quest to bring us back to a more bigoted and ignorant time.
