The Wall

There's a wall you hit sometimes in online research. Most of the translation research I do on the internet is pretty straightforward - checking proper names, verifying financial terms, looking up patents to harvest industry vocabulary. But if the information you need doesn't have a commercial angle or an enthusiastic fan base, soon you come to the place where the sidewalk ends.

I've had a little internet research project cooking on the back burner for a couple of years now. I want to know where the Russian word гуталин (goo-ta-LEEN, an old-fashioned word for shoe polish) comes from. Tracking down the etymologies of words borrowed into Russian in earlier generations is not the kind of hobby that will get me invited to lunch at the White House, but it satisfies a curiosity that I’m sure other translators understand.

So… I poked around in all sorts of places and found out that a material called guttaline was patented in the 1890s. The journal I found it in described it as a synthetic substitute for rubber (check it out, the recipe's a doozy). But there the trail ended, as if the inventors patented it and then forgot about it. My husband, who is both an engineer and a sympathetic listener, heard me out recently and said, "There's nothing on it because it was a dud." Why so? "Because there weren't any successful synthetic rubbers until after WWI." I looked it up. He's right. But here's an idea: if guttaline was a flop as a synthetic rubber, could it have proven to be a fair shoe polish? Accidental inventions happen all the time.

Sources on the Russian internet lean toward a German etymology because the first two syllables sound like gute, or good, in German. This feels like a false friend to me, but I can't put my finger on why. 

When you find yourself going in circles and not finding anything new in an internet search, here's a tip: try an image search. I did a search for гуталин in Yandex images and came up with a bunch of funny photos of little kids with shoe polish all over them. And then there was this:

This gives me a brand name - Альберта Закса - and some other information to check. Better yet, when you open an image in Yandex it gives you links to all the places where you can find the image online. I can't wait to find out where this new information will lead!

Зачем вам столько гуталина?

The гуталин obsession continues. I've found the full names of the "MM. Worms and Zwierchowski" who patented guttaline some time in the 1890s.

Eugene Worms and Alexandre-Sigismond Zwierzchowski worked together on a number of patents, like one here for "an improved bicycle." They also invented things independently and with other partners. I doubt they had much knowledge of Mongol footwear, though.

Гуталин

Let's say you just watched Простоквашино (the one where Dyadya Fyodor ditches his parents at the train station) for the umpteenth time and are wondering where the word гуталин (goo-ta-LEEN, "shoe polish") came from.

Sounds German, right?

So you pop over to the Russian Wikipedia to get the lay of the land. You find out that:
A) гуталин was invented in France during the reign of Charles II (no reference)
B) гуталин was made of eggs mixed with ashes and either vinegar or beer (again no reference)
C) the word гуталин comes from the Mongol word for shoes - "gutal" (who needs references, anyway??)

Never, never put your faith in the Russian Wikipedia. The English WP has a whole lot more people inputting on the articles, and even so you can run into impressionistic articles. But the Russian Wikipedia is like a phone book put together by a deaf insane asylum patient ("Snip, snip, what fun! Cutting and pasting little bits of information from around the web into this nice template! The Mongol word for shoes! Delightful!")

Shutting the door on all the noisy RWP fun, you think of all the possible spellings for goutaline/gouthalene/guttaline and search Google books.

Guttaline returns a snippet of an article in an 1892 edition of "Electrical Engineer," where the following intriguing definition is given:

"Guttaline - A new preparation for the purpose of replacing indiarubber and guttapercha, has been brought out and protected by MM. Worms and Zwierchowski. To a quantity of Manila gum tempered with benezene is added 5 per cent. of Auvergne bitumen, also mixed with benzene..."

That reference to gutta percha caught my eye as being possibly relevant. These two guys invented a replacement for a natural material and patented it with a name that reminded people of that natural material.

Not as interesting as a medieval Mongol-French cultural exchange on the subject of shoe polish, but somehow more convincing. I am still very interested in this word and will keep digging...