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The foods that Nova Scotians or Bluenoses cherish most were brought to the “wharf of North America” by immigrants. The original inhabitants were a people speaking an Algonquian language, the Mi’kmaq, who arrived, based on archaeological evidence, at least 10,000 years ago. They’ve been in the neighbourhood quite a while then ― long enough even to make place names from some of their food words, for example, the Nova Scotia town of Shubenacadie.

Groundnuts

The Nova Scotia town, lake and river of Shubenacadie is a French and English attempt at a Mi’kmaq phrase signifying the presence of sequbbun (groundnuts). The tasty groundnut, Apios americana, is a member of the pea family, and its dark-red or brown flowers resemble those of the sweet pea. They thrive in damp ground from Nova Scotia to Ontario and are found in much smaller, endangered stands as far west as Wisconsin.

Mi’kmaq people prize the sweet tubers of this plant which has a chestnut flavour and they call it sequbbun. Sequbbunakade is Mi’kmaq for ‘groundnut-place.’ Groundnut is also called Micmac potato, bog potato, Indian potato and travellers’ delight. The botanical genus name is Greek apios ‘a pair’ because the tubers on an individual rhizome seem to grow in pairs. One healthy plant may have ten or twelve tubers. Mi’kmaq people taught the first white settlers that these tubers were a good source of starch. As early as 1613, Biencourt and his followers at Port Royal went on foraging trips around the colony and along the nearby shores digging for groundnuts.

The flower of the groundnut displays the typical form of blossoms

of the pea family of plants.

The Mi’kmaq locative suffix -akadi,-akwadik shows up in other regional place names like Quoddy Harbour, from Mi’kmaq nooda-akwade ‘seal-hunting place,’ and Tracadie, from tul-akadik ‘camping place.’ A bit south, Maine’s Passamaquoddy Bay is from a Mi’kmaq phrase that means ‘pollock place,’ referring to a marine food fish called pollock in English.

Other Nova Scotia places indicating food location include Antigonish, from Mi’kmaq n’alegihooneech ‘broken-branches,’ a reference to a place where bears came to forage for beechnuts.

Baccaro, east of Cape Sable Island, is from a Basque word for codfish. Bakeapple Barren, named after the delicious little berries, is in Cape Breton Highlands National Park. Bass River explains itself. The Canard River was just ducky for hunters of wildfowl. Framboise abounded in wild raspberries. Big clams lurked in tidal flats offshore at Grosses Coques. Ostrea Lake once had oyster beds. The Latin word for oyster and its zoological genus name is ostrea. Later and more layful English place names based on food words in Nova Scotia include Pickle Bay, The Beefsteak, and Cheese Factory Corner.

Later immigrants, who came long after the Mi’kmaq, included John Cabot who made landfall at Cape Breton Island in 1497, and more than a century later, de Monts and Champlain who founded Port Royal in 1605, the first farm settlement by Europeans on land that eventually became part of Canada. The French named it Acadia. In 1621, King James I granted Sir William Alexander land officially dubbed New Scotland or, in Latin, Nova Scotia.

Molly Muise, a Mi'kmaq woman in a mid-nineteenth-century photograph

Governor Cornwallis founded Halifax in 1749 and arranged an influx of German Protestants, more than 2,000 of whom were settled near Lunenburg. In the years that followed, pre-Loyalist New Englanders came to Nova Scotia, along with Irish and Yorkshiremen. Significantly, the first Scots reached Pictou in 1773. The outbreak of the American Revolution began a flow of more than 20,000 Loyalists. African-Americans came first as slaves of some Loyalists, as free people from Jamaica, and as free citizens after the war of 1812. Today, people from England, Ireland, Wales, and Scotland make up 70 percent of the population of Nova Scotia, while roughly 8 percent are of Acadian and French origin. Ninety-four percent list their mother tongue as English, 3 percent as French. But all enjoy the local comestibles that comprise the bounty of Nova Scotia.

© 2012 copyright William Gordon Casselman

Learn about other Canadian Food Words

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Reviews of my Book

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A Great New Review of My Latest Book!

October 26, 2011

Welcome to the Enchanted Forest

By WB Johnston

This review is about Bill Casselman’s latest e-book about words: Where a Dobdob Meets a Dikdik: A Word Lover’s Guide to the Weirdest, Wackiest, and Wonkiest Lexical Gems (Kindle Edition)

“Wade Davis, lately of National Geographic, once described each living language as “an old-growth forest of the human spirit.” Once you decide to enter the kleptomaniacal woods of our mother tongue, what you need is more than a tour guide. This is no Disney-fied ‘keep-your-hands-inside-the-car-at all-times’, point A to point B, clear-cutting mining of language. You, here, are in the hands of Sir William of Cassel, a genuine shaman modestly posing as a simple lover of words.

In the best of the spiritual tradition, Bill is the shape-shifter who constantly leads you to all the places you need to find in your soul. Every page is a new country, an invitation to an excursion into the wonderland of rich connections with the myriad of sources of what so often we unthinkingly wield as a prosaic tool.

Pay absolutely no attention to anyone who tells you that this book is anything but pure gold. It’s simply not true, sadly, that all the world loves a lover. Particularly someone whose love is so boundless.

But Sir William is fearless. You don’t earn your keep as a medicine man if you have a thin skin. While I cannot for the life of me understand how anyone could walk away from this book unmoved by its wit, its wisdom and the beautiful transparency by which the author celebrates the glorious romp of our almost unlimited linguistic exuberance, I have to sadly conclude that once in a while, you do meet someone who can’t see the forest for the trees, eh?

Read this book. Leave it on the sofa instead of the $%#!*$% TV remote. Maybe someone you care about will pick it up, even just for a moment, and fall in love with their heritage?

Leave it on your desk at work and trust that someone will riffle through it when you are out at lunch. Shamans are magicians of the highest order. The work of their hands and hearts is game-changing. Or, hey, put it on your Kindle and just feel comforted that you can wander back out into the forest with Bill even in the middle of a boring lecture.

Enjoy.”

 (Casselman replies: Thank you so much, Dr. J., for the kudos.)

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Jenni French of San Francisco, California writes on her blog “My Corner of the Universe” for March 19, 2011:

Casselman, Bill. Where a Dobdob Meets a Dikdik: A World Lover’s Guide to the Weirdest, Wackiest, and Wonkiest Lexical Gems. Avon, MA: Adams Media, 2010.

“I admit it: I’m a word nerd. I love words: weird words, long words, obscure words, funny words.  This book is right up my alley.  With chapters like “Nautical Words,” “Creepy Words,” and “Edible Words,” I have enjoyed every page of this book. 

And the author has quite a way with words, so I have found myself rereading many sentences in this book and slowing my progress through it. 

My current favorite sentence is found in a discussion of dog hybrid breed names: “What a revolting concatenation of cutesiness and smarmy nomenclatorial treacle parading under the name of canine hybrid breed names” (19).

I’m sure I’ll have another favorite sentence in a day or two. 

This book is just that good and just that entertaining.”

(Author Bill Casselman replies: “Thanks, Jenni!” )

Just a reminder that this book contains my ALL-NEW word essays, none of which are available anywhere else in print or online.

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Cindy Lapeña on her blog “Creativity Unlimited” of July 19 ,2011, writes:

Posted by mimrlith in 365 Things to Look Forward to.
Tags: 365 things to look forward to, books, reading

19. Starting a book

To a certified bibliophile like me, a.k.a. bookworm, one of the most exciting things to look forward to is to start reading a new book. In fact, sometimes the prospect of starting to read a new book is so exciting that I have to hurry to finish the book I am currently reading, just so I can start a new one.

If there’s one thing I can’t resist, it’s a book, especially if it promises to be a good one. Of course there are certain books I just won’t touch or be seen with, but at the risk of being hung by my thumbs by fans of such literature, I will not mention any genres in particular. . .

Seeing a book with a title that totally captivates me, like Where a Dobdob meets a Dikdik (yes, that is a book title!) has me so worked up, I just can’t wait to dive in. I imagine all sorts of deliciously fancifully outrageous words with a title like that. Is it obvious? I just love books on words. You won’t believe how many dictionaries I own. Or books on lexical oddities and other lexical explorations. Yes, I am a logophile of sorts. I love the new words I pick up from new books. I relish finding out the meanings of all manner of words and phrases and expressions. What could be more fun?”

(Replies author Bill Casselman: Please scroll to bottom of page or click here to link to a free seven-page preview of my book, Where a Dobdob Meets a Dikdik.

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Testimonial Email

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Dear Mr. Casselman,
A search for the origins of an improbable-looking word, paraprosdokian, led me to the first piece of your prose I have had the pleasure of reading, “The Bogus Word Paraprosdokian & Lazy Con Artists of Academe.” I have just placed an order for Where a Dobdob Meets a Dikdik, Canadian Words & Sayings, and As The Canoe Tips, and will add more of your titles as I finish these.

I have just retired from a 40-plus year career in book publishing, the last thirty years spent as director/editor of a number of university presses, attempting to sort the genuine writers from the “Lazy Con Artists of Academe.” Sad to say, the latter have so over-bred the former that I could no longer see the rare gem in the avalanches of offal that daily swamped my office and desk. I visited your website and spent far too long there; it was a pleasure to meet a real writer through his work.

. . . I revisited the paraprosdokian page, and have finally quit laughing again at “Casselman’s Conclusion.” You were not unkind to the “profligate prof-lets.” During my years as an acquisitions editor, in rejection letters I often quoted Prof. Moses Hadas, classicist at Columbia University, who wrote a young scholar in response to having been sent the prof-let’s first book, “Thank you for sending me your book. I will waste no time reading it.”

I know I will enjoy your books. Keep up the good work.

Thank you,
Luther Wilson
Director (Retired)
University of New Mexico Press, among others

I invite you to tour my site and select from the hundreds of word stories here.

To begin, click on the Word List banner below.

Then perhaps browse the site map with its links to every page of my website.

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Summer 2007 - Bill Casselman's latest publication

is an essay in a new book entitled

Barry Callaghan: Essays on his Works

in the Writers Series published by Guernica Editions

Click here to read a sample

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order online from Chapters-Indigo

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