Folk etymologies are not unique to the age of Snopes. I discovered this amusing truth just after I’d signed my fellow writer Doug Preston’s letter to the Justice Department encouraging that arm of government to press forward with an investigation of possible monopolistic practices by Amazon.com Inc. First, I was curious about the opposition to Preston’s initiative, which turns out to comprise a small army of self-publishing authors. Their beneficent view of Jeff Bezos’ giant corporation, diametrically opposed to the way university- and trade-press authors talk about it, got me thinking about the name itself. What do a giant online retailer, a threatened river in South America, and a legendary tribe of female warriors have in common?
Clue: There’s no punch line. But the first thing I discovered was that the Greeks themselves invented a story for their women warriors, claiming that the name derived from a- and –mazos, meaning “without a breast,” presumably because these fearless women lopped off one breast to improve their archery skills. However, no Greek art depicting Amazons shows any of them missing a mammary; and someone clearly forgot to tell William Marston that part of the legend when he set out to invent the generously endowed Wonder Woman. A likelier source for the name is found in the Iranian compound ha-mazan, “one fighting together,” or possibly ama-janah, “virility-killing.” That the myth itself alternately posited a race of promiscuous women and a tribe of celibate warriors, with voluptuous images contrasting a folk notion of mastectomy, starts the Amazons off on the paradoxical path that DC Comics (and, eventually, Warner Brothers) exploited.
But Bezos’ Amazon was not, it turns out, named for a woman warrior, but for the mighty river that wends its way from the mountains of Peru to the Atlantic Ocean. What is female or warriorlike about that body of water? Possibly everything, possibly nothing. One theory holds that the 1541 Spanish explorer Francisco de Orellana named the river after either a group of female warriors or possibly a similar group of beardless, long-haired male warriors of the Tapuya tribe. Another points to a native Guarani term, amassona, meaning “boat-destroyer,” alluding to a tidal bore that reverses the river’s current as far as 800 kilometers upstream from the ocean. In this formulation, the name Amazon really ought to end at that point, to be replaced by the Brazilian name, Solimões, for the upper part of the river.
Apparently Bezos didn’t take his research that far, or even so far as to consider some relationship between the greatest river in the world and a mythical tribe of female fighters. He began, rather, with the name Cadabra, presumably short for abracadabra (itself possibly a bowdlerization of abecedary). When his lawyer misheard the word as Cadaver, Bezos was prompted to change the name. He went for the river because of the implication of large scale and because website listings at the time were mostly alphabetical. The A and Z in Amazon didn’t hurt, since it allowed the logo designer to join them with a little yellow arrow, suggesting a place that sells everything from A to Z and also leaves its customers smiling.
Which, presumably, they will continue to do despite the Authors United letter to the Justice Department. But that’s another story, neither mythic nor watery.