The Latin word “albus” for white hasn’t taken off. We may eat the egg’s albumen everyday and we may know that an albino has a deficiency in pigmentation but beyond this things get murky. The assertion that the Romans called Britain “Albion” because of the white cliffs of Dover is no more than hypothesis.
albus didn’t much make it into Latin languages either. Instead it was the German tribes who managed to push their “blank” into Old French to give it “blanc” or white. The Spaniards have “blanco”, the Portuguese “branco”.
Once one realises that “casa” is house in Spanish and in Portuguese, one wonders what a white house is going to call itself. The Moroccan city we call Casablanca provides an answer of sorts.
The largest financial centre in Africa was known to the Berbers as Anfa and is Dar al-Bayda in Arabic. In the last half of the fifteenth century the Portuguese bombed the city to deal with piracy and then built a fortress whose surrounding town became “Casa Branca” and from this the Arab name comes. If you pop “Dar al-Bayda” into Google translate you get “The house of the egg”, which may suggest an algorithmic bent to Latin but who knows.
Anyway, when the Crowns of Portugal and Spain were in personal union known to history as the Iberian Union, from 1580 to 1640, the town became Casablanca. This process of word-for-word translation is a “calque”. Given we started with the Germans, our “beer garden” is a calque of Biergarten. Mr Tolkien calqued Bilbo by calling his cul-de-sac the transliteral “Bag End” while Bag Bottom would have been closer. Anyway, Casablanca it became and Casablanca it remained after the French moved in.
The US had no “White House” when President Washington proclaimed Thursday 26 November 1789 a “Day of Publick Thanksgivin”. By 1863 it did, and the then occupant of the White House proclaimed 26 November that year and the final Thursday of November thereafter “Thanksgiving Day”.
In 1939 the then occupant of the White House made a change on the advice of Harry Hopkins. Hopkins had been told that the lateness of Thanksgiving that year – 30 November – would be bad for Christmas sales, the latter period commencing after the former holiday. FDR declared that Thanksgiving would be the second-to-last. Needless to say, the sporting industry, the travel industry, the holiday industry and millions of others were affected.
The matter became known as Franksgiving and – you can see it on Google – one of Warner Bros’ 1940 Merrie Melodies cartoons, Holiday Highlights, gave 21 November “for Democrats” and 28 November “for Republicans”.
Congress provided the way out with a joint resolution making the Day the fourth Thursday of November. While FDR approved this as early as 1941, on Thursday 26 November 1942 he requested that the day and the following New Year’s Day “be observed in prayer, publicly and privately”.
For this was the war. A fortnight or so before – from 8 to 16 November 1942 – the Americans had been engaged in the Naval Battle of Casablanca.
Even Warner Bros came to the party. The same day of FDR’s request, 26 November 1942, Warner Bros released a movie in New York City staring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. It was not called “Casabranca”.
