A British Columbia Word
Once upon a time I was camping near Pacific Rim National Park on Vancouver Island. One morning as I hunched over a tidal rock pool to observe a starfish lazily lunching on a hapless mollusc, an elderly gentleman (of a type whom I seem to encounter in every natural setting) approached. Let’s just call him the World’s Foremost Living Expert — on pretty well every topic known to human conversation. We exchanged a bit of amiable lip-flap, and in the course of his palaver, the grizzled old salt asked me if I knew that the sockeye salmon received its name when hearty fishermen of olden days waded into the water and captured the fish by socking it in the eye.
“It’s an urge that could overtake any of us,” I said, eyeing him.
Then, humbly and with contrition that might have made Mother Teresa envious, I suggested there might be another explanation, having to do with a local aboriginal language called Coast Salish; but by then the World’s Foremost Living Expert was a hundred feet up the beach where I perceived that he had waylaid another innocent and was busily explaining The Origin Of The Universe As Revealed To Pat Robertson and Stephen Harper one evening when both were sharing a bubble bath with Saint Peter.
Sockeye salmon makes one of the best eating fishes in the world, but it is often served quite hideously tarted up by an intrusive chef who has applied scales made of sugar paste!!! Yeccchh.
The Salish are a people who live, among other places, on the southern part of Vancouver Island and some surrounding islets. Sockeye is the English version of the Coast Salish suk-kegh ‘red fish,’ an apt name for this frisky Pacific salmon. Or, it may derive directly from Northern Straits Salish seqey ‘red fish’.
Ichthyology, the scientific study of fish (ichthys Greek ‘fish’), presents a fascinating word related to this salmon. Sockeye are anadromous. (pronounced: uh-NA-dromous). When they are spawning, anadromous fish swim or run (dromos Greek ‘running’) up (ana Greek ‘up’) a river from the sea. The opposite word for fish who swim or run down (kata Greek ‘down’) a river to the sea, to spawn in the sea, is catadromous (pronounced kuh-TA-dromous).
Ichthyological name of the sockeye: Oncorhynchus = ogkos Greek ‘tumour,’ ‘bump’ + rhughkos Greek ‘nose of an animal, snout, beak,’so that the sense of the zoological name is bumpy-snout, perfectly describing the sockeye, particularly as it reaches spawning time and turns bump-nosed or hook-nosed and bright red.
Curiously the sockeye has another common name ‘blueback,’ applied to the salmon in its adult migratory phase as it swims in the ocean, so named because the fish at that time in their life cycle have a blue dorsal coloration and silver sides.
Word mavens may find this note about ichthys, the Greek word for fish, of interest.
Historians have claimed, for example, that early Christians, meeting one another on a dusty Roman street, might have drawn with a stick a simple fish in the dirt or sand to indicate their religious allegiance.
There is more on fish, bird, and other animal names native to Canada in my book, Casselman's Canadian Words.
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