“Tango” origin and meaning

There is no certainty about the origin and meaning of the word tango, since it has many interpretations. The word tango is previous to the dancing style we call that way nowadays. In the 1803 edition of the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española, it appears as a variant of tángano, the name given to the bone or stone used in the game of the same name. In 1889 edition, the first meaning refers to tángano again, and in the second one, tango is defined as a “black or popular American dance and party”. It was not until 1984, and only in its second meaning, that the word tango appears as “Argentine dancing style, interpreted by a hugging couple, of binary musical form and 2x4 compass, internationally known”. About its origin, many authors think that the word comes from the African languages that came to the Plate River with the slaves, in the eighteenth century. Blas Matamoro believes that both the words tango and tambó were expressions that referred to the tam-tam or candombe drums, used in the black dances, and that people used to say “tocá tango” or “tocá tambó” (“play the drums”) when they wanted the musicians to play. Also, the slave traffickers used to call the slave concentration places tango, both in Africa and America. Gobello thinks that tango “is a word used in all the countries with slaves” and says “Esteban Pichardo, in his Provincial dictionary of Cuban words (Matanzas, Real Marina publisher, 1836, p. 242) defined tango as ‘black meeting, where people danced with the music of drums. In Buenos Aires, they called tango (in the beginning of the nineteenth century) to the houses where black people had their parties. Probably, tango is a word of Portuguese origin, that came to America through the Crèole Afro-Portuguese from Santo Thomé, and arrived in Spain from Cuba’”.

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