Hey, how come there’s no four-letter word for “four-letter word”?

Dear Word Detective: I recently found “sabe” on the Scrabble word list. I wondered what it meant, but could only find it in the Merriam-Webster Scrabble Players Dictionary as a verb meaning “to savvy.” I know “savvy” is related to the Spanish “sabe,” but have been unable to find any English use of the word. Is it an English word? If not, any idea how it ended up on the word list?

Rats. I was getting all fired up for my anti-Scrabble rant, which I trot out every two or three years, when I had a disturbing realization. I personally dislike playing Scrabble. But the game’s makers really ought to be awarded some sort of prize for enriching the vocabulary of millions of people since Alfred Mosher Butts, an unemployed architect, invented it in 1938. Then again, Butts gets the credit, but he didn’t really invent the Scrabble game we know today. His original version was called “Lexico,” and didn’t even have a game board, just the little tiles. It wasn’t until a guy named James Brunot bought the rights to Lexico in 1947, fiddled with it a bit, added the board, and renamed it Scrabble that the game took off. The Chairman of Macy’s played Scrabble on vacation, ordered all his stores to stock it, and turned it into a national sensation. Today, according to Hasbro, the game’s current maker, there’s a Scrabble set in one out of every three US households. We actually own a very nice deluxe set ourselves, received as a gift a decade ago. It makes a lovely bookend.

In any case, yes, “sabe” is a real English word (pronounced “SAH-bay”) although it is a direct borrowing of the Spanish word “sabe.” The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines “to sabe” as a simple synonym of “to savvy,” which in turn means “to know, to understand, to comprehend.” The OED notes that “savvy,” and presumably “sabe” as well, are often used in the interrogative form “Sabe?” or “Savvy?” following an explanation given to someone whose understanding of said explanation is considered, for whatever reason, to be in doubt (“You’ve got to quit; savey?”, 1897; “Ha! Sabe that?” 1850). Both “sabe” and “savvy” are also nouns, meaning “practical intelligence” or “street smarts,” and adjectives meaning “quick-witted” or “in the know” (“A savvy tenant putting a deposit on his house gains a 12-month option to buy at the price ruling when he made the deposit,” 1980). Interestingly, the OED also defines the interjection “Quien sabe?”, originally a Spanish phrase meaning “Who knows?” or “Who can say?” (“Was this the same man for whom Murdock’s Landing was named? Quien sabe?”, 2005).

When those of us who grew up with 1950s television in the US hear “sabe,” many of us immediately think of the word “kemosabe,” which is what Tonto, faithful Indian companion to the Lone Ranger, called the masked dude in the wildly popular TV series. But there doesn’t seem to be any connection between “sabe” and “kemosabe.” According to an exhaustive investigation by The Straight Dope’s Cecil Adams (www.straightdope.com) many years ago, Jim Jewell, who directed the Lone Ranger radio serial back in the late 1930s, took the word from the name of a camp (Kamp Kee-Mo Sah-Bee) run by his father-in-law in Michigan. Jewell maintained that “Kee-Mo Sah-Bee” meant “trusted scout” in the local Indian language, and he was at least in the ballpark on that. Cecil Adams managed to track down language exerts who confirmed that the word “giimoozaabi” did mean something like “scout” in the Ojibwe language, the Ottawa tribe in the area of the camp did speak Ojibwe, and “giimoozaabi” probably sounded a good deal like “Kee-Mo Sah-Bee” or “Kemosabe.” That’s some serious detective work.

Unfortunately, even the awesome and resourceful Cecil Adams was unable to determine just how the Lone Ranger’s faithful Indian companion ended up with the name “Tonto,” which, in Spanish, is an insult meaning “drunk” or “crazy.”

Neatly pressed lucre.

Dear Word Detective: I heard someone say that the term “money laundering” originated with Mafia ownership of laundromats in the United States. I think the speaker was clearly hitting the suds that day. Do you know when and how the term “money laundering” came to be? — Chris.

Oh boy, a Mafia question. Always fun. Back in the 1990s, I wrote a weekly column for the New York Daily News called “City Slang,” in which I answered readers’ questions about the rich and varied vernacular of the city. Since the Mob is a popular obsession in NYC, a lot of the queries I received were about organized crime slang I’d never heard, so I’d ask crime reporters at the paper and some retired NYPD detectives I knew if they’d ever heard the term. I also discovered that a couple of guys I knew knew guys who were “connected” in the Mob sense, and they’d ask around for me. More often than not, the search turned up bupkis, and I had to assume that the word in question was some screenwriter’s invention. It wasn’t a total wash, however. I did learn who to call if I needed somebody’s legs broken.

The verb “to launder,” meaning “to wash or clean,” is an interesting word. It first appeared in the mid-17th century, but the antiquated noun form “launder,” meaning “someone who cleans clothes,” dates back to the 14th century. The ultimate root of both words is the Latin “lavare,” to wash, which also gave us “lavatory.” But the word “launder” is actually a contraction of the earlier (and now obsolete) word “lavender,” which meant “a washerwoman” in the 13th century. Various theories have been proposed over the years attempting to connect this washing “lavender” to the shrub known as “lavender,” such as the aromatic flowers of the lavender being used to scent freshly-washed clothes. But it now appears that they are two completely separate words, and that the “lavender” shrub takes its name from the same roots that gave us “livid,” i.e., “bluish,” as are lavender blossoms.

The term “money laundering,” defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the process of concealing the origins of money obtained illegally by passing it through a complex sequence of banking transfers or commercial transactions,” seems to have first appeared in the early 1960s, though it only became widely known during the Watergate investigations of the 1970s, in which suitcases full of cash played a role in forcing the resignation of President Richard Nixon. While organized crime has long used legitimate businesses to “launder” dirty money, “money laundering” simply employs an established figurative use of “launder” meaning “sanitize, render acceptable” (“House votes to launder report before publication,” UPI headline, 1/30/76). So laundromats are not the root of “money laundering,” and I guess you’re right about the suds.

Although “money laundering” is nowhere near as intriguing as it should be (I’ve always pictured industrial Maytags full of cash), the practice has spawned at least one amusing term. In the wake of US law enforcement attempts to prevent money laundering by requiring any bank deposit of more than $10,000 to be reported to the government, criminals looking to hide cash began breaking up large sums into a series of small deposits, just under that limit, in different banks. By 1985, this tactic was known as “smurfing,” after the then-popular TV cartoon series The Smurfs, which featured numerous and highly-animated small blue people running around. It’s an inspired bit of slang for an otherwise dry and probably tedious activity (“To be more efficient, smurfs target areas where several banks are close to each other and, like most people, they avoid busy banks. ‘There is very little smurfing in New York City,’ says Charles Saphos, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Florida, ‘because the lines are too long.'” Business Week, 1985). There are now laws against “smurfing,” which is more soberly called “structuring” by bankers. But I really like the sound of “Anti-Smurfing Law.”