naturalplastic wrote:
Yes. Here in the States it bascially means "a fugitive from justice", and "an outlaw", especially one out of the legends of the old West. Americans rarely break the word down in their heads to even associate it with "being desperate".
Your word "desparado" probably evolved seperately, and out of the 20th Century British habit of sticking "oh" on the end of words (like turning the word "cheer" into "cheerio", or turning "command" into "commando raid"). Whereas our word's oh ending comes from the archaic Spanish spoken in what is now the Western US before we Anglos took over.
Quote:
The term commando originally derives from Latin commendare, to recommend, via the Dutch word kommando, which translates as "a command or order" and also roughly to "mobile infantry regiment". This term originally referred to units of Boer mounted infantry, who fought during the Xhosa Wars and the First and Second Boer Wars. The Dutch word kommando, in turn, originated from the Portuguese term comando, used in India in the sense of a group of troops under an autonomous command that performed special missions during a battle or siege. The word was adopted into Afrikaans from interactions with the Portuguese in their nearby African colonies, in whose language the word comando means "command". In South Africa similar troops operated in small detachments, usually traveling on horseback, and launched rapid attacks against British troops. During the Second World War, both the British and the Germans decided to reuse this term to designate the new special operations troops they had formed (the British designated commandos and the German Kommandos). Later the term was used by other countries to designate some of their elite forces.
tl;dr: The Brits didn't add the 'o' to commando, it was already there when they borrowed the word.
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