Books to Sample / Humour / The Wording Room / Q&A /Biography / New / Schedule
BUY BOOKS ONLINE / Submit Sayings / Photos / Contact / Links / Site Map / Home
published by McArthur & Company
British Columbia
Skookum
Skookum means big and mighty in Chinook jargon, a lingua franca, a trading language based on the speech of the Chinook Indians, with words from French, English, Salish, Nootka and other local tongues thrown in as needed. Chinook jargon was used for over a hundred years until the turn of the century by aboriginal peoples and the white traders who plied the Pacific coast.
Skookumchuck is a town in southeastern British Columbia, where Skookumchuck Creek empties into the Kootenay River.
Skookum = mighty and chuk=water or river in Chinook Jargon. Together the roots can mean 'white water rapids.' The word skookum came into Chinook Jargon from the Chahalis language where skukm meant 'powerful, brave, or large.'
The adjective produced nicknames like Skookum Jim, one of seven men who discovered gold at Bonanza Creek on August 17, 1896, at the start of the Klondike Gold Rush.
Skookum-house was a synonym for a jail on the Pacific coast.
Skookum tumtum meant a strong, brave heart. Tumtum was the sound of the heart beating, not a reference to the English nursery word for stomach.
Heehee tumtum was a merry heart.
Sick tumtum meant one was sad.
And your tumtum might well get sick observing this silly racist stereotype on an apple crate label.
Other Words in Chinook JargonChicamin
One hundred years ago, chicamin was a very common term for money all over the northwest and west of Canada, and you still here it now and then today, though usually from an old- timer. In Chinook Jargon chikamin meant anything made of metal. It entered the trading language from Vancouver Island Nootka where tsikimin was the word for iron. In a similar manner British English used brass to refer to coins or money.
© 1991 Canada Post Corporation
The Chinook wind is a warm, dry easterly that blows down from the Rockies across southern Alberta and Saskatchewan. A Chinook can take a brutally cold February winter morning in Lethbridge and make it feel like June by noon. One hears it as a verb too. "Chinooked last night. Threw all my blankets off. Sweating like a stuck pig."
The Chinook arch is a great vaulted strip of blue sky seen high up over the Rockies above the western horizon which foretells the arrival of Chinook winds. The old Chinook sky that betokens balmy days ahead may see the peculiar Chinook clouds that lead the weather system in over the Rockies.
Chinook clouds seem to be spinning or rolling because of the rising and falling air currents produced as they swoosh over the stone ridges of the mountains. In the jargon of meteorologists such clouds are sometimes said to come in lenticular waves. Calgary newcomers who get that vernal itch during a mild day of winter are said to be suffering from Chinook fever.
The wind takes its name from a people who lived along the north shore of the Columbia river at its mouth until well after whites took the area. Their language is often called Chinookan. Its name comes from Chahalis, a Salish tongue of western Washington state, where tsinúk is the word for village, or perhaps the particular name of a former village now abandonned and its site lost to history.
In the 1970s, when I was a senior producer at CBC Radio's "This Country In The Morning," Peter Gzowski tried to introduce and promote a new Canadian national holiday, to fall on a date between New Year's and Easter. We ran a contest in which our radio listeners sent in suggested names for this mid-winter feast. The winning entry was Chinook Day. Alas, it never came to pass. But Chinook winds still do pass, late in the prairie winter to preview spring.
High MuckamuckHigh muckamuck is a term I remember my father using as a way to describe any arrogant S.O.B. of an official. As he was a school principal, it sprang up often when he spoke of school boards. The term, common in Canadian and American English, is a borrowing, with a touch of folk etymology, from Chinook Jargon, the west coast trading language of the last century. Hyiu meant much and came into the catch-all trading language from the Nootka tongue of Vancouver Island where ih means 'big.' Muckamuck was food in Coast Salish. In the days when food gathering took much time and skill, anyone who had lots of food was an important and successful person.
HyakHyak was a potent word-of-all-trades in the old Chinook Jargon. As an imperative verb, it meant hurry up or get a move on. As an adjective and adverb it was perhaps the most widely-known Chinook Jargon word on our west coast. Hyak! Quick!
In a variant spelling of hyack, it came to have the specialized local meaning in British Columbia of volunteer fireman, because they tried to get to fires quickly. That usage shows up even today in the proud name of the Honourable Hyack Battery of New Westminster, B.C.
Siwash
Siwash is a word in Chinook Jargon. Siwash began its verbal life as an insulting voyageurs' term for a native person, and it is still an insult. It is a slurry jumbling up in Chinook Jargon of sauvage, the voyageurs' French term for any member of an aboriginal people, equivalent to savage or wildman.
Although siwash is vile and derogatory, or perhaps just because of its swinish bigotry, it gained wide use.
A demeaning double insult here with the putdown word squaw and the insulting siwash or savage tossed in together to help sell white man's apples in the 1930s.
- Siwash tongue was a synonym for Chinook Jargon.
- To siwash once meant to travel quickly, deftly, and lightly, making use of natural shelters on the trail, or sleeping in the open as a First Nations person might do.
- Siwash wind is a Pacific Coast localism for any fresh gale that blows up briskly.
- A Siwash blanket is low cloud cover that portends weather warmer than if the ceiling were higher.
- R. D. Symons, a splendid writer about our western country, states in Many Trails, his 1963 collection of tales, that "most ranchers in the interior (of B.C.) loosely refer to all Indians as Siwashes".
- A British Columbian synonym for a beach-comber is Siwash logger.
- Antkiti Siwashes were legendary native giants of Chilko Lake, well southeast of Redstone, British Columbia., that sometimes an Antkiti Siwash may return to track and haunt those living in the interior of the province who have sinned against the spirit of the land.
Tyee Papa
Tyee Papa is Chinook Jargon for 'God.' Literally it means 'Big Boss Father,' not too shabby a moniker for a deity! Here's a line of a common table prayer or grace offered at meals:
Tyee papa, mahsie klashe muckamuck.
'God, thanks for the good food.'
The sentence illustrates well very how a lingua franca borrows bits and pieces from every other language being used around it. Tyee is from the Nootka tongue where tayi means 'older brother.' But in Chinook Jargon it came to mean 'big boss.' Thus God is here 'Big Boss Papa.' Mahsie is from voyageurs' French merci 'thanks.' Klashe is Nootka for 'good.' Muckamuck is the Salish word for 'food.'
Finally, a few terms in Chinook wawa (speech) whose origins you can guess:
- Tik-tik was a watch or a telegraph office
- La puss was a cat.
- Chik-chik was a wagon or a wheel.
- And that's it for today!
© 2007 William Gordon Casselman
SELECT SAMPLES FROM OTHER WORD BOOKS
