Leaping from airplanes to land on the battlefields of World War II, paratroopers of the U.S. Army shouted the Spanish name given by Mexican soldiers to an Indian chief who had terrorized white settlers in northern Mexico and the south-western United States eighty years earlier. How did it happen that "Geronimo!" sometimes followed by an Indian war whoop became the battle cry of American paratroopers?

Apparently the immediate cause was a movie of that name that paratroopers had watched as they were beginning their training in 1940. The 1939 movie depicts Geronimo, chief of the Chiricahua Apache tribe, as a bloodthirsty villain. Portrayed by the wild-eyed actor Chief Thundercloud, the movie Geronimo is an Apache whose sole delight is slaughtering whites, preferably defenseless women and children. According to Cinebooks' Motion Picture Guide, "Chief Thundercloud has only one expression--murderous."

Needless to say, that movie version of Geronimo is not entirely the truth. The real Geronimo, born in 1829 in what is now Arizona, lived peaceably until Mexicans killed his wife, mother, and children in 1858. In retaliation, he led raids against both Mexican and American white settlers, then settled on a reservation. In 1876, when the U.S. government tried to move the Chiricahua to New Mexico, he took up arms again and continued his occasional raids until 1887, when he was finally captured and relocated to Fort Sill, Oklahoma. He took up farming, converted to Christianity, and became such a public figure that he was in the inaugural parade for President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905. Geronimo's Story of His Life, published in 1906, three years before his death, was a best seller.

Back in 1940, however, it was the ferocious warrior of the earlier film who commanded the attention of the paratroopers. It is said that Aubrey Eberhardt, a member of the first platoon testing methods of air drops in 1940, was inspired by the movie to announce that he would shout "Geronimo" as he jumped the next day. He did; his shout was beard on the ground; and the rest of the paratroopers adopted it as their call. Since then, of course, any kind of attack can be heralded in English with Geronimo!

In his Apache language, the warrior was known as Goyathlay or "one who yawns." It was the Mexicans who called him Geronimo, the Spanish version of the name Jerome. Numerous other words have crossed the border into English via Mexican Spanish, including Nahuatl words like chocolate, and more recently chihuahua (1858), a breed of dog named after the Mexican city, and maquiladora (1976), a south-of-the-border factory that uses cheap labor to make products for export to the north.

The World in So Many Words, by Allan A. Metcalf. Copyright © 1999 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.