Canadian West Coast Expressions & Sayings from Bill Casselman's Canadian Word of the Day

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Larri Woodrow of Langley, British Columbia, a new corres-pondent, has emailed me some zesty expressions of the West Coast and one from our Prairies, all new to me and, I hope, interesting to you.

• SHIN-TANGLE

• BRIAR-HUMPER

• They’re out humping the briars.

Larri Woodrow explains: “Hiking the “shin-tangle” of Vancouver Island’s dense rainforest, sometimes to hunt grouse or blacktail deer. Commonly, the dense new second-growth forest with its shrubs, thorny vines, salal, and decaying logging debris in old clear-cuts, vigorous with new life. Hence the noun “Briarhumper.”

• How goes the raping and pillaging?

A common greeting exchanged when West Coast truck loggers, who are old acquaintances, meet. Coastal loggers were once brashly honest about their careers harvesting valuable old growth timber: giant Douglas fir, Western red cedar, hemlock, spruce and balsam.

• He’s gettin’ his feet.

Larri writes that this expression concerned “a young recruit in logging camp adjusting to working in his new loggers’ footwear—Pierre Paris or Dayton caulked, high and heavy leather boots made in Vancouver.”

• Fetch me a bucket of steam from the steam plant.

“Instructions given in 1956 from a journeyman pipe-fitter to this 17 year-old young man on his first day of work in the maintenance shop at Elk Falls Mill, Campbell River, BC.”

Larri Woodrow continues, “This was a test. When I balked, I was given the name of another young employee who went to the steam plant, bucket in hand, and returned as directed. Men in the steam-plant had opened a valve to direct steam into the bucket. This young fellow took it well. He carried on with his pipe-fitter apprenticeship. Because he chose to follow instructions to the letter, and never let on he was embarrassed, he grew to be respected by the crew. Those who showed embarrassment were teased more until their initiation was judged to be complete. Or until they quit. If they folded and quit under the gentle teasing they demonstrated they weren’t ready for a man’s job.”

• Jumper season opens Saturday.

Jumpers are whitetail deer. This very common Canadian expression across our Prairies is not yet in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary. Just shows how a web column can stay ahead of a printed dictionary, said Casselman with all due lack of humility while blushing becomingly. Larri Woodrow emails, “This is used extensively east of the Rockies and especially by the Métis people of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

Zoological Taxonomy of The Whitetail Deer

Kingdom: Animalia

Phylum: Chordata

Subphylum: Vertebrata

Class: Mammalia

Order: Artiodactyla

Family: Cervidae

Subfamily: Capreolinae

Genus: Odocoileus

Species: Odocoileus virginianus

Beware:

Rant by Word Crank Begins Here.

Odocoileus is New Scientific Latin, from the Greek noun odous odontis ‘tooth’ + Greek adjective koilos ‘hollow’ to mean ‘hollow-toothed.’

But the word Odocoileus is wrongly formed.

It is stupid.

It is illiterate.

Yet it is totally accepted in all zoological literature.

But that does not make it correct.

It is—and I’ll use words comprehensible by naturalists—bad-bad, poo-poo, ka-ka, doo-doo, scat-scat.

But, Daddy, Why is the Word Wrong?

Its form should be: *Odontocoilus or *Odontocoileus. Hideous as both utterances are. Just hear how they clunk forth from the pronouncing tongue like phlegmy throat clog.

Like so many of the newer zoological names, Odocoileus was coined by some zoologist or naturalist who knew not one iota of Greek — nor a jot or tittle about the combinative rules in English for coining scientific terms from ancient Greek and Latin words.

The root of the Greek word for tooth is NOT odo-, it is odont-, which is the reason, in etymological passages of dictionaries, that the citation form of Greek words so often consists of two forms. Tooth would be usually given like this: odous, odontis. Some dictionaries, aware of the ignorance of most “experts” who feel qualified to form new scientific words, then proceed helpfully to add a third citation, something like odont- or odonto- and these dictionaries clearly identify that as the combining form to be used. Often it appears like this: (comb.) odont-. It is apparent that Smokey The New-Word-Forming Bear never read such entries, and would never think of consulting the Classics Department at the University of Bohunkia where he labours.

The first cited form is the nominative singular (odous) and the second cited form is the genitive (odontis) because the full root is found in the genitive case but not always in the nominative case. This is true in Latin and Greek and in many Indo-European languages where nouns and adjectives are declined in cases.

When we set out to create a new scientific term in English and we decide to use Greek nouns and adjectives to make up our new word, we use the root-forming part of the Greek noun, taken from the STEM of the Greek noun, NOT from the nominitive case. We’ve only been doing this in English for 1,000 years, so it ought not to be a news flash to Little Roger Ranger who coined the abortive Odocoileus.

By the way, let’s look at some quite common words whose coiners did use the proper forms. To have your teeth straightened, you might visit an orthodontist, Greek orthos ‘straight’ + odont- ‘tooth’ + -ist ‘one who does something ’. -Ist is a common agent suffix borrowed from Greek into Latin and thence into French and English. Therefore an orthodontist is ‘one who straightens teeth.’ In coining hundreds of scientific words in English the proper root of the Greek word for tooth has been used correctly for centuries: periodontic dentistry, forensic odontology, odontoid, endodontics, etc.

Now this complaint is not specialist nitpicking by a word nut (well…); it is common knowledge that might have been elicited from the most perfunctory riffle through a few etymological passages in any good English dictionary.

The other thorn of annoyance lurking in the unmade bed of modern scientific word-making is: zoologists NEVER admit mistakes and NEVER change the offending neologisms once they have crept into science. There in the fusty cabinet of zoological nomenclature, sealed in the glass jars of mindless mummified approval, there bobble the monstrous mooncalfs and stillborn exhibits of verbal teratology, floating belly-up, goggle-eyed, embrined forever in the formaldehyde of error.

There are egregious howlers, blatant mistakes, in the scientific names of plants and animals so old that they were first committed by no less an eminence that the very founder of our binomial naming system, Linnaeus himself. Even the swift Swede fell victim to a misreading or a mistaken etymology, as every mortal wordhunter will from time to time. But, unlike the obdurate buffaloheads of modern zoology, we have the humility to correct error. Some of Linnaeus' seemingly hallowed mistakes have never been altered. Is that scientific?

Here endeth the rant intrusive. Please continue to the final example.

• Daylight in the swamp!

This was, says Larri Woodrow,“a common bunkhouse wake-up call by BC lumber camp foremen.”

The slightly more grungy one that I remember from Junior Forest Ranger Camp at Killbear, Ontario was bellowed into our bunkhouse by the camp cook well before his breakfast for 30 teenage high-school boys was ready to serve. What Old Jim hollered was: “Stop pullin’ on your cocks and start pullin’ on your socks.” That got us up, so to speak.