CUNT: The Blunt History of a Word

A Blunt History of the Word Cunt

Dateline: Lapland, Feb. 14

In a humorous piece about snooty gardeners who grow only the rarest of horticultural exotica, written years ago for an elite gardening magazine, I once invented a pernicious weed and named it “twatwort, scourge of the Regency parterre.” The lady editor of Enchanted Loam magazine rose in outrage, charged down the hallway to my humble freelancer’s desk, spread her arms like a wing-drying stork and sang in its entirety Brünnhilde’s Schlactruf from Act Two of Die Walküre.

As her vowels of elongated fury died away, along with my hopes of a fee, the editor pronounced her refusal to publish my funny piece. I begged her pardon repeatedly, like the cringing, lickspittle toady I am. I crawled before her on all fours, emitting plaintive meeping noises learned from my study of voles and lemmings. But I was barred for life from the lilac precincts of the magazine. She pointed to the door and I was forced to pick up from the desk my cheap plaster bust of Casanova and glumly exit the premises. Thank goodness I hadn’t called it cuntwort.

I retail that anecdote only to demonstrate that some sexual taboo terms brook no utterance in civilized company. Cunt is such a banned word. The word twat is slightly less the cause of female revulsion, but, said aloud, it too may cancel that date for the symphony.

Why It Upsets Us

The etymology of the word cunt is disputed, as is its use in polite society. Not only is it one of the dozen major taboo words currently in English, cunt is for the majority of English-speaking women in the West the most loathsome of all vulgarisms.

When the word’s profane thunder hammers the tin of an English sentence, women hear the hateful and total dismissal of what Goethe called “the eternal feminine.”

Men, on the other hand, recognize something dark and redolent of body truth in cunt’s repellent monosyllabic starkness: namely, the male imperative to penetrate, ejaculate, and then make for the hills as quickly as possible in the hopes of chancing upon yet another opportunity to spread their insistent seed. No violins or perfumed love-couches hover near the word. Cunt is a sex word with the romantic cloak of mutuality and lovingness flung off. This is also why men employ the word as one of the most frequent insults directed at women.

As Freud suggested, in order that civilization and the raising of the young may happen, the male’s chief impulse of ‘wham!-bam!-thank-you-m’am’ has had to be repressed. Women have been only too happy to oblige in such squelching. As Siggie further said, “Civilization is repression.”\

          Reclaiming a powerful word, celebrating girls have some sparkler fun.

Usage in Great Britain

From the internet here is a useful passage:

“The word cunt still mainly remains the one word in the English language that is considered more offensive than fuck ― this can be largely attributed to its history as a misogynist instrument, a history that elevates its offensiveness above that of rival four-letter words.

However, the term cunt is often used, primarily by members of the working class, as a term of endearment. Particularly in the south of England, around the Essex and London Area. Context and tone usually show the distinction between the word being used as a term of endearment or it being used pejoratively.”

Earliest Appearance in English

In his 1954 book Street-Names of the City of London, Eilert Ekwall, a great linguist who studied English place names, produced evidence of a “Gropecuntelane,” that is, Grope Cunt Lane, a shady lane indeed frequented by prostitutes and their customers. The year? Around 1230 anno Domini.

Nautical Usage

Unfinished Cunt Splice

“A cunt splice,” says one internet article, “is a type of rope splice used to join two lines in the rigging of ships. The two ends are side spliced together with a gap between the two parts, forming a short section where the two lines lay side-by-side when taut.” In recent times the name has been censored and changed to the less offensive term cut splice.

Etymology

The origin of the word is disputed, principally because it is an ancient root and of pre-literate provenance. The sources I give are what I surmise. Can these sources be proven in any scientific way when they extend back into the past beyond the inscribed record, to a time before humans had learned to write? No. They are hypothetical constructs that I believe are etymologically sound.

Monogenesis Theory

But I believe in the monogenesis (Greek, ‘single birth’) of human language. I am convinced, by the admittedly not abundant proofs, that coherent and grammatical speech began and then evolved in Africa’s Rift Valley and that all later languages on earth stem from such a protolanguage. As humans moved out of that African valley to populate the entire earth they took their speech with them and that speech through millennia was altered and transformed and cleaved into cloves of, first, dialects and, second, split into seemingly unrelated languages, so evolved that familial recognition is often impossible. Yet those grunted mutterings that ricocheted off Rift rocks so far in the past constituted the single mother tongue of all human languages.

Ruhlen & Greenberg & Cavalli-Sforza

Linguistic monogenesis is the Merritt Ruhlen and Joseph Greenberg hypothesis, supported by genetic studies. Here I quote from the Wikipedia article on Ruhlen: “Perhaps the strongest evidence supporting Ruhlen can be found in the work of the geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, who has studied the genes in human populations throughout the world and constructed a phylogenetic tree, a structure similar in many respects to traditional trees of language families, showing where in the tree given genetic groups separated. The results are widely (though not universally) accepted as matching up remarkably well with Ruhlen's proposed structure of the languages and language families of the world.”

If this fascinating topic lures you, try the scholarly or the popular books by Merritt Ruhlen. On the Origin of Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy is Ruhlen’s 1994 scholarly tome. The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue is another book by Merritt Ruhlen published in 1994 exploring the same topics for non-linguists.


C-Section on the C-Word

The Germanic and now English word cunt has verbal relatives all the way back in Egyptian hieroglyphics. Ka-t in hieroglyphics meant vulva, vagina, mother, and women. Qefen-t, another ancient Egyptian word for vagina, even has the letter n infixed in the root. Consider the Hittite kun ‘tail of an animal.’ A piece of tail, anyone? In Persian kun is the ass, the bum, the posterior. So this is not only a Proto-Indo-European root word. It looks like a very early borrowing from a Mediterranean rootstock or language now lost. Eric Partridge is the linguist who first suggested this. I think he was correct. The Greek reflex of the Latin cunnus root is gunē ‘woman’ usually transliterated in Latin and English as gyne and supplying a large number of English scientific and learned words like gynecology, misogynist and androgynous. Absolutely cognate with the Greek gunē is the Sanskrit yoni, an artistic representation of the external female genitalia, an object of veneration among Hindus.

The Hebrew kus and keus and Arabic cognates also share the common Mediterranean origin of all these words for something essentially female.

Whence That Terminal /T/ ?

There has been much dithering and flithering among Indo-European philologists trying to explain how the terminal /t/ became attached to a morpheme which early explorers of etymology saw as stemming from Latin cunnus ‘cunt.’ Many of the Romance languages still have this cunnus-root with similar meanings. Perhaps the most frequently used word in modern street Spanish is coño with its Romance-language cognates (all from Latin cunnus) French con, Italian conno and cunno, and Portugese cona. Modern Czech has kunda ‘vagina’ used in male-chauvinist invective and equivalent to English’s dismissive use of cunt. Czech also has an affectionate diminutive form kundicka.

I would posit that Middle Low German forms with a terminal dental (the letter /d/ or the letter/t/) like Kunte are no mystery. Compare the Middle Dutch kunte and modern Dutch kut and note that the letter /n/ drops out again. The forms borrowed into the earliest Germanic and Scandinavian languages, from whatever source, simply kept the /t/ from their Mediterranean ultimate source. In Semitic languages, for example, terminal /t/ is the standard marker for grammatical femininity. Since there is presumably no more essentially feminine word than cunt, it is small wonder that its essential feminine ending was retained in borrowing. One of my favorite forms of the word is an affectionate Irish diminutive, cunteen.

A Few Notes on Usage

As we have seen above, in the year 1230 cunt was not obscene. It was merely an English word for a female’s private parts. Even in Chaucer’s time, in The Canterbury Tales (1380-1390 CE), the first great poem of Middle English, Chaucer uses the word in a normal descriptive manner. In the Miller’s Tale, at line 90, we read “Pryvely he caught hir by the queynte.” In 138o queynte was pronounced ‘cunt.’

By the era of Shakespeare the word is offensive and obscene and Shakespeare must use it on stage in covert form in puns and acronyms, the most famous of which is this punning passage from Act 3, Scene 2 of Hamlet:

HAMLET:
Lady, shall I lie in your lap? [Lying down at OPHELIA’s feet.]

OPHELIA:
No, my lord.

HAMLET:
I mean, my head upon your lap?

OPHELIA:
Ay, my lord.

HAMLET:
Do you think I meant country matters?

OPHELIA:
I think nothing, my lord.

HAMLET:
That's a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs.

OPHELIA:
What is, my lord?

HAMLET:
Nothing.

OPHELIA:
You are merry, my lord.

HAMLET:
Who, I?

OPHELIA:
Ay, my lord.



In Elizabethan English,the word lap was both the lap, as we now use the word, but was also a euphemism for cunt. Cunt did not appear in any major dictionary of the English language from 1795 to 1961, when finally it was included in Webster's Third New International Dictionary with the comment “usu. considered obscene.” Its first appearance in the Oxford English Dictionary was in 1972.

There are many internet sites teeming with usage notes on English obscenities, some of them even written by persons who can spell. I shall conclude with a joke that got me in big trouble in my third collection of Canadian Sayings. Infuriated damsels from Vancouver Island to New Brunswick wrote to my former publisher urging her to stop publishing my books and to arrange, if possible, to have me castrated live on the noon news by a woman dressed as Boudicca using a large pair of dull pliers. I had been so bold as to reprint a bawdy joke that demonstrates the way men use the word in the continuing battle of the sexes.

The joke goes like this:

Question: Why did God create the yeast infection?

Answer: So women too would know what it’s like to live with an irritating cunt.


To all who are offended by that joke: go join a cult. Maybe you can bribe god to “git” me? The civilized remainder of our merry company shall continue our adult study of the English language.

copyright (c) 2013 William Gordon Casselman

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Addendum 
 
“Opposing the Use of ‘Cunt’ is Itself Sexist”?

On his website, The Nail That Sticks Up, writer Samuel J. Hartman quotes a British firebrand. Hartman writes: “London-based feminist Kate Allen claims that being offended by it is sexist itself, given our lackadaisical attitude towards “dick” or “prick”: "Opposing the use of ‘cunt’ is itself sexist, because it grants more respected status to a woman’s genitals than to a man’s. The extra level of offensiveness that many people perceive the word to carry implies a squeamishness about women’s bits - this attitude is in itself sexist or even misogynist! We’re beginning to get over that squeamishness, reverting the word back to its original meaning and reclaiming it as a descriptive term. This is a positive action, removing its negative connotations.”

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email from Dr. Ralph Wilson
Sunday, January 10, 2010



In Chinese “Kun” is a 3-letter word, honoring the Female

Dear Bill Casselman,

. . . I am working on a Ph.D. thesis and I wanted to check out the socially accepted etymology of a word that I think originated with a Chinese term. The Chinese term is one of the eight ones that are contained in the Ba Gua (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ba_gua), which is a system of describing the physical universe as an increasingly complex outworking of the binary reality starting with the “monad” or Yin-Yang symbol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yin_yang).

I will digress so that I have it noted in this email that the male-dominated world that we have today is reflected in the description of the Yin-Yang trigram and the I-Ching—which is a set of 64 combinations of the trigrams (8 times 8 equals 64). This trigram and the eight sets of three lines is the basis of the I-Ching (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Ching). FYI: the I-Ching is best translated by Ralph Alan Dale in his version of the I-Ching (http://www.amazon.com/Tao-Te-Ching-Lao-Tsu/dp/0760749981).

The male-dominated interpretation of the appearance of each line is described almost universally as a “solid” line versus a “broken” line. For several years now I have advocated that humanity grow up and become more honoring of each of our two sexes, especially in looking at the I-Ching. If there were a matriarchal society in which men were subjugated as women are today, this description would become the “closed” line and the “open” line. Each of those two ways of describing the term ends up giving a somewhat negative term to describe one of the two sexes.

However, I propose society now use one from each of those descriptions and call the lines a “solid” and an “open” line. Such a use of terms would automatically bring the newcomer to the concept face-to-face with the fact that women and men are so different as to make it necessary to give each a sovereign description.

In the Bagua, and the I-Ching the two outstanding trigrams are:
Qian (Heaven) represented by a set of three solid lines, and
Kun (Earth) represented by a set of three open lines.

The reason for my writing you is simply to say that the Chinese came up with the basic word first that later became known as “cunt”.

Now that I have read your essay, I think that the added “t” likely came from the Jewish writers as you describe in the essay: “In Semitic languages, for example, terminal /t/ is the standard marker for grammatical femininity.” . . .

Best wishes to you in your continued enjoyment of creatively working with words.

Healthful regards,
Ralph Wilson

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SKOOKUM - - - A MAGIC WORD FROM BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA

 

                                      A British Columbia Word

Long-time residents of British Columbia still toss the adjective skookum into their daily speech, nowadays chiefly as a bit of local linguistic colour.

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. Among some west-coast native peoples, skookum may refer to a big (and therefore evil) spirit force or devil.

SKOOKUMCHUCK, B.C.

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.’


SALTCHUCK
The Chinook jargon word for water chuk came from Nuu-chah-nulth language where ch’a’ak is water. Another very common British Columbia use of this root pops up in the Chinook jargon word for the ocean, saltchuck. It is used in everyday speech to mean the ocean or any body of salt water like an ocean inlet or bay.

CHUCK
By itself too, chuck is used in informal language especially on the northern Pacific coast of North America as a colorful localism for any extensive body of water: a big lake, a fjord-like inlet of the ocean, and so forth.

SKOOKUM JIM

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.

                                                Is this label racist?

Should you require proof that skookum remains an operative term, know that “Skookum” has recently been borrowed as the name of an online manga comic strip. Manga is the Japanese word for comics. Manga developed from a mixture of Japanese and Western styles of comic-book drawing, and took its current form in the late 1940s. The “Skookum” manga is sexist and fraught with bodily exaggeration. But manga-maniacs ought to check it out at www.skookumanga.com

 

Want to learn more about Canadian and World Words?

Check out my 500-page word website. Click link below.

http://www.billcasselman.com

The eve of May Day in northern Europe is Walpurgisnacht, a sort of spring cleaning for witches. The witchlets whisk out the coven room and go flitting through the spring night to test drive new brooms and get maintenance done on winter-stored brooms. This Hexenritt or witches’ ride takes place on mountaintops. One fave peak is the Brocken in the Harz Mountains of central Germany. So, whether we  wished you recently Happy Walpurgisnacht or Happy May Day, here we choose to celebrate May with a spring wildflower familiar to Canadians and Americans, a leafy denizen of our eastern woodlands, the mayapple.

Weekending in the Haliburton Highlands of Central Ontario, the

botanizing wanderer finds sometimes a bounty of mayflowers and sometimes that mayapples are not up but, greeting the wanderer through awakening woods, may be Clintonia whose tiny white flowers dapple the oak-leaf rubble of the forest floor. Dog-Tooth Violets may reflex their slender yellow petals. The little charmer is also known as Trout Lily because of the mottling of its leaves, resembling the speckled flank of a brook trout. I keep a speckled trout flank nailed to the barn door in the country, strictly for purposes of comparison, lest even one metaphor go astray. Maroon-hued trilliums abound on moist uplands and may open and present their three-petalled stars to the spring sunshine. These trillums tend to open with a modest reddish blush and then turn dazzling white as they beckon their pollinators.

Genus Name of the Mayapple: Podophyllum, Botanical Latin, shortened from the original name in old botany, Anapodophyllum or “duckfoot leaf” = anas Greek 'duck' + pous, podos Greek 'foot' + phyllon Greek' leaf.'

The basal leaf does have a long, foot-like stem. The shape of the leaf could be said to resemble a duck’s webbed foot.

 
 
Barbarians, Berbers & Barberry

Family: Berberidaceae, the barberry family, perennial herbs and shrubs in about twelve genera, mostly of the northern temperate region < berberis Old French, one of the barberries < barbaris Latin, one of the shrubs < ultimately Barbaroi Greek, literally ‘stammerers,’ but any foreigner who could not speak Greek was a barbaros and was thus uttering baby-like nonsense syllables like ‘bar-bar.’ Bar-bar is how the ancient Greeks signified baby talk. It was the precise equivalent of English goo-goo.

This notion is of ancient Indo-European provenance. Consider barbaras Sanskrit for ‘stammering.’ A barberry-like shrub must have sometime come from North Africa or the Middle East. Note that Arabic borrowed the Greek term too, as al-Barbar, originally any people the Moors encountered who could not speak Arabic, notably the Berber people, whose name reflects this Arab prejudice. The Berber language is not Arabic. In English, of course, we still refer to barbarians.


PELTA & the Canadian Species

Mayapple possesses the pleasingly plosive appellation of Podophyllum peltatum. Peltatus is classical military Latin for ‘armed with a pelta.’ The pelta was the sturdy little shield, shaped like a half moon, carried by the Roman infantry whose armourers borrowed it from the pelte shield of the ancient Thracians. Each of the mayapple’s two large leaves vaguely resemble such a shield. A pelta was made of wood or wicker-work, covered with skin or leather and the soldier who carried such a shield was a peltast. Peltasts were a kind of light infantry employed by the ancient Greeks. As well as the pelte, these men wore quilted tunics and leather leggings. Usually their arms also included long spears and swords.

Common Name Misnomer

Like many common names of plants, mayapple is a slight misnomer, since the yellow fruit does not appear until later in the summer. But, when it did ripen enticingly, the mayapple sent pioneers and even

visiting explorers into dizzy dithyrambs of praise. Here is W. Ross King, author of The Sportsman and Naturalist in Canada (1866): “a delicious and refreshing wild fruit...about the size of a bantam’s egg...presents a mass of juicy pulp and seeds, not unlike pineapple in flavour.” Steady on, old man. Ripe fruit can be done up as preserves and added to jams and jellies too. Many moderns who have tasted it say mayapple berries are bland, acidic, and too pulpy.

 

Uses & Cautions

The leaves and roots are poisonous. The American Food & Drug Administration lists this plant as “unsafe to use.” But can one find its extracts for sale in some Canadian “health” stores? You bet! Just glug those toxins down your gullet, suckers!

Worth repeating: The ovoid yellow fruit of the mayapple is edible only when it is ripe. Before it ripens, the fruit is dangerous to consume. Mayapple plants adorn many poison lists and are listed in hospital emergency room poison therapy manuals. That ought to be proof sufficient, and yet every year children and healthfood nuts are admitted to medical care presenting with symptoms of mayapple poisoning.


Clinical Uses of Mayapple

While there are many dangerous folk remedies connected with extracts of mayapple, like its unadvised use as a purgative, pharmaceutical investigation has led to the clinical use of podophyllin, a resin from the mayapple, and podophyllotoxin and derivatives like epipodophyllotoxin. In 1977 podophyllin was the drug of choice in the treatment of venereal warts or condylomata acuminata. American medical literature reports that the Penobscot peoples of Maine treated certain cancers with an extract from the rhizome of the mayapple.

Compounds found in mayapple like alpha and beta peltatin are currently used in the treatment of certain cancers. And so the search goes on.

                         © 2013 William Gordon Casselman

If you'd like to learn more about Canadian words and words in general, please click the link below to visit my website.

http://www.billcasselman.com 

 

KIACK is 100% CANUCK: a Neat Nova Scotia Fish Word

Kiack is a rough-scaled, bony little fish called the alewife in English, and ki’ak in the Mi’kmaq language. It is fished during the spring salmon run when it comes up maritime rivers, particularly along Nova Scotia ’s South Shore. In Québec French it’s un gaspareau, which is an Acadian word, and Acadians gave the fish its French name. Gaspereau was the Acadian name for a lake just south of Kentville, Nova Scotia. Did the fish name come before the lake name, or vice versa? I don’t know. Perhaps a Nova Scotian Acadian reader can point us to the original?

Here’s an excerpt from the campaign diary of Arthur Bull who ran for the NDP in Nova West during the 2004 federal election.

“Fishing for Kiack: Finally, I visited a group of kiack fishermen down in Argyle. This was a new fishery to me. The kiack (also called gaspereau and alewife in other areas) is fished with a dip net out of small brooks in the Tusket River area. . .we proceeded to Kiack Brook. There was a small shelter with a stove, where some of the fishermen rest, while a couple of fishermen take turns dip-netting from two platforms on either side of the brook.” 

Etymology of Genus and Species Names

One zoological name of the little kiack is the daunting Pomolobus pseudoharengus. But when that jaw-breaker is broken into its Latin and Greek roots, it is a most appropriate name. Let’s examine Pomolobus first. Pomum is the Latin word for apple; pomo- is its combining form. Lobus in Late Latin meant earlobe, pod, capsule, round belly, and was itself borrowed from Classical Greek lobos, with similar meanings. Pseudos in Greek meant false. Harengus is the zoological Latin word for herring. So a pseudo-harengus is a false herring. And a pomolobous pseudoharengus is an apple-bellied false herring-like fish.

Pseudo - is widely used in modern English as a prefix to words denoting fakery and deception. A pseudonym is a false name (Greek onyma, name) often used by an author to disguise her or his real name. Pseudoscience is fake science; and, memorably, a Pseud is a phoney person, a pompous deceiver, a poseur, a professional “expert” of dubious expertise, of the type that television chat program producers find so convincing, unlike many in of their TV audience. Pseud as a word was coined and promulgated by Private Eye, the British satirical magazine. But it is merely a shortening of the noun pseudo ‘a pretentious person, a faker’ which has been in use as an English putdown for more than 500 years.

Kiack, Gaspereau, Alewive

Let us return to our little fish. By its zoological moniker then it’s an apple-bellied false herring. The fish does have a naturally big belly, and this gave the English common name too, an alewife being just what it looks like, a woman who kept an alehouse, sampled her brew copiously, and had a fat stomach. An ale wife might also have been a tavern customer, a wife overly fond of a foaming tankard of fermented ale.

 A more common zoological label for this fish is Alosa pseudoharengus. Alausa was a Late Latin word for a shad-like fish.

In Nova Scotia, kiack became an insult too. Kiack was a term of derision in early Nova Scotia for anyone who ate alewives, implying that they were poor, rustic, and could not afford to indulge in civilized “town” food. But, as a matter of fact, there was once a thriving export trade in kiacks from Nova Scotia to the New England states, to Boston in particular. Local fishermen packed thousands of barrels of salted gaspereaux or kiacks each year for shipment.

Kiack once throve abundantly in Nova Scotia’s Tusket River. Here’s praise by Michael McAdam in the Spring 1999 journal of The Atlantic Salmon Federation (Vol. 48 No. 1): “THE TUSKET has always been unique among Nova Scotia 's great rivers. She rises in the scrublands, bogs and old-growth forest bordering the southwestern extremity of the Tobeatic Wilderness Reserve. The two major branches, the East and West (aka Carleton River) branches, flow through a lengthy series of streams, each connected through chains of lakes.

The East Branch's Quinan River, fed by Big Gull, Quinan and Great Barren Lakes, picks up the dark, foam-flecked outflows of Rushy, Canoe and Keggeshook lakes and join Gillfillan Lake's long expanse to swell the Tusket's widening rush to the sea.

Part of the Tusket's aforementioned uniqueness is the fact that its riverine habitat is interspersed with large, relatively deep bodies of water which afford cool, oxygenated refuge to migratory fish such as the Atlantic Salmon and gaspereau (kiacks, alewives, gasparots) which arrive each spring.

The increasing acidity of her waters has stabilized at levels still lethal to alevins; the remnants of the once great runs of kiacks provide an annual harvest for only a few tenacious fishermen—but the exotic species thrive and increase their numbers each season.” 
                                                       —Michael McAdam, ASF Journal


Silly Origin of the Word Kiack 
Once Given in Oxford Dictionaries

Contrary to a previously printed OED etymology, there is no linguistic reason whatsoever to suppose that kiack is a variant of kayak, the Inuit boat. Ki’ak is the Mi’kmaq word for this fish. The kayak was never used where this fish is abundant.

Nor is there a relationship with a kyack, the American packsack that goes on either side of a packsaddle.

The word kiack does not appear in the first or the second edition of The Canadian Oxford Dictionary. I guess the way Nova Scotians talk is unimportant to the Toronto snobs who wrote that dictionary. However, the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary does have an entry for the word kiack. Unfortunately they have no knowledge of Mi’kmaq, and all they can do is offer the meek and hesitant “perhaps from” kayak. And then again, OED, perhaps not. Perhaps some knowledge of Canadian aboriginal languages and some letting go of British snottiness in the face of “foreign” languages might stand the world’s leading dictionary writers in better stead than lickspittle guesses based in wilful, racist ignorance?

By the way, the common spelling in Nova Scotia and indeed in Canada is kiack, not as the Oxford Dictionary suggests, kayak. Nowadays kayak as a spelling is almost never used, since it causes confusion with the Inuit water craft, the same confusion it caused in the not-very-inquisitive minds of OED lexicographers.

Lexicographic Update!
The Oxford English Dictionary has removed its suggested etymology of the word kayak as the source of kiack. Now it sniffishly whispers that “kayak” [sic] is “perhaps from Algonquian.” Eastern Algonquian is the large family to which the Mi'kmaq language belongs.

However the OED persists in putting the definition under the head word kayak, stubbornly presenting as common the least used by Canadians of kiack’s several spellings. It will not even list kiack, the spelling version that appears in most Canadian newspapers and Nova Scotia fishing guides and magazines. There is apparently no end to British disdain for exactly how we colonials spell our own words. You may know also that Oxford University Press has closed down its Canadian dictionary operations in Canada. There will be no third edition of the Oxford Canadian Dictionary any time soon.

And now, with today’s rantlet expressed, I shall swim away to peruse awhile my Mi’kmaq dictionary. Hint, hint, OED! 

                                    (c) copyright 2013 William Gordon Casselman

 
If you would like to learn more about words, click below on the link to my website.

http://www.billcasselman.com 

Canada Primrose:Etymology of the common and botanical names of this harbinger of a late northern spring

Québec name: la primevère du lac Mistassini

Common names : Lake Mistassini primrose, Canadian primrose, Dwarf Canadian primrose, Bird's Eye primrose, Canada Cowslip, Oxlip

Genus: Primula < primula veris medieval Latin, literally ‘first little thing of spring’ < primus Latin, first + - ula Latin feminine diminutive ending, little + ver, veris Latin, spring.

Family: Primulaceae, the primrose family
Species: Of the more than 500 species in Primula, most are tender biennials and perennials grown as pot plants and put into Canadian gardens for the summer. But some will winter if protected. Hundreds of hybrids exist, but only one wild one will concern us here.

The Canadian primrose, Primula mistassinica Michx., is now rare in the Pacific and western areas of its range. Other names include Dwarf Canadian primrose, Lake Mistassini primrose, and Bird's Eye primrose. A hardy little primula that likes cool wet feet, it welcomes a May morning with a compact umbel of purply-pink flowers that have vivid yellow eyes. Preferred habitats include springy stream banks and dripping rock ledges that keep its soil moist.

The plant was discovered in the spring of 1786 in the eastern part of its range in northern Québec. The year before, Louis XVI, monarch of France, had fallen into a regal funk because his gardens at Versailles had begun to bore him. “One more clump of fleur-de-lys and I’ll eat my wig!” he may have pouted to France’s greatest botanist of the day, André Michaux, remembered in the last part of the flower’s botanical name, in the authority tag, as Michx. The king then shipped the obedient and delighted Michaux off to the new world to collect more inspiring specimens.

Michaux discovered and named hundreds of plants new to the botany of his day. He traveled widely in North America. One floral gem Michaux found beside Lake Mistassini, named by the local Montagnais for the great boulders that line its shore. Mista-assini means ‘big-rock water’ in Montagnais. Michaux called it a fairy primrose because it was smaller than French species he knew.

Historic fur trading rock at the head of the Rupert River on Lake Mistassini. Fur brigades supplying Mistassini from Rupert's House would leave tobacco offerings here when passing.

Lac mistassini is Quebec’s largest natural lake. Half the size of Lake Ontario, Mistassini Lake lies 700 kilometres north of Montreal near Chibougamau, surrounded by black spruce forests and fabled rivers. It’s a brook trout paradise. From Lake Mistassini most North American hatcheries get their initial brookie stock.

Word Lore

Primrose is an Englishing of primula. But the oldest word in our language for a species is cowslip which began in Anglo-Saxon or Old English as cu-slyppe ‘cow dung,’ such an unpleasant tag for so fetching an herb arising from the fact that these plants did well in a moist meadow near a plop of cow manure and Anglo-Saxons apparently thought the flower sprang from cow paddies! Slyppe is cognate with slipa Old Norse, slime, dung, shit, mud, and is related to slop.

Uses: Primrose flowers are made into a wine, used to perk up jams, and candied to decorate pastries. Young cowslip leaves add spice to salads and meat stuffings. Some people chop up the pungent root of Primula vulgaris (Latin, common) and add it to potpourri. Personally I would not use it for any of these purposes due to its allergen-laden leaflets.

Toxic Leaves of Primrose?
A popular belief of gardeners is that all primroses cause skin irritation if one touches the leaves. This is not true for everyone and not true for all primroses. Most have glandular hairs on the underside of the leaves. The heads of these hairs contain a quinone called primetin that will indeed irritate human skin but usually only in persons particularly prone to dermal allergies. The stamens of many species produce a mild contact dermatitis. Don’t touch the stamens and avoid vacuum-cleaner-like sniffings of the flowers.

Here’s a toxicology lab note on the active chemical:
5,8-dihydroxyflavone (primetin) the contact sensitizer of Primula mistassinica Michx.

“ 5,8-Dihydroxyflavone (primetin) has been shown to be the sensitizer in Primula mistassinica Michaux and probably the source of allergic contact dermatitis in four milkers. Its sensitizing properties as determined in guinea-pigs, are strong. As far as is known this is the first experimental demonstration of the sensitizing potency of a flavone. Presumably the flavone, with its uncommon 5,8-arrangement of hydroxy groups, is oxidized in the skin to the corresponding quinone (primetinquinone). Quinone was prepared from primetin and used for experimental sensitization of guinea-pigs. It also revealed strong sensitizing properties. Cross-reactions were obtained not only with the synthetic quinone in the flavone-sensitive animals but also with primetin in primetinquinone-sensitive guinea-pigs. Preliminary sensitization tests with other flavones have demonstrated that the whole group of flavonoid components should be taken into consideration as potential sensitizers.” authors of tox. abstract: Hausen BM, Schmalle HW, Marshall D, Thomson RH.



Biographical Note about Michaux

André Michaux was born in 1746 and died in 1802. After studying under Bernard de Jussieu, beginning in 1779, he began a series of explorations searching for and classifying new species of plants in England, France and the Pyrenees. Becoming French Consul in Persia led to full-time botanical explorations there (1782-85). Next, by order of the king of France, Louis XVI, Michaux travelled in North America to send back tree species suitable to transplant for naval shipbuilding. French shipbuilders wished to copy English masts and see if the superbly tall pines of North America, so excellent as masts, might grow in France. Before his departure from Paris, Thomas Jefferson provided Michaux him with letters of introduction as a scientist. In 1801, while exploring for plants in Madagascar his health failed from the exertion and he died of a tropical fever. Besides the hundreds of plants that bear his name, Michaux is remembered as the silviculturist who wrote the first book on the forest trees of America.

Quotations

Shakespeare enjoyed the sound of the word, as in Act 2 of Macbeth where the porter’s famous hell speech concludes, “I had thought to have let in some of all professions that go the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire.” In Hamlet, the chaste Ophelia advises her brother Laertes against “the primrose path of dalliance.” 

       © copyright 2013

 

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Wanigan: A Word Stuffed Full of Early Canadian Stories

WANIGAN

 

Wanigan: A Word Full of Canadian History

New Brunswick lumbermen used this storage box on a raft or a scow to transport to a new site personnel and camp supplies. Canoeists still use a wooden wanigan to carry various supplies.

In the old lumbering days of New Brunswick , the word was sometimes applied to the raft itself. The cook shack could be on the boat too with a floating mess hall, until facilities on shore were set up.

Whites borrowed the term into English from local Algonkian-speaking peoples.

In Ojibwa wa’nikka’n was a storage pit containing a cache of odds and ends that might be useful for trade.

Montagnais has atawangan ‘trade storage’ related to atawan ‘to trade,’ the same Algonkian root that named the Ottawa people, the trading band that gave its name to our capital city.

In the Abnaki language waniigan is a ‘pit trap’ or ‘a container for sundries.’

A variant of wanigan was wangan (no relationship to the computer game, that's a Japanese word). “Running the wangan” was taking a loaded boat downriver.

In Seven Rivers of Canada, Hugh MacLennan writes of lumbering on New Brunswick’s St. John River: “Within three weeks the Wangan boat men clear the river of stray logs all the way from Beechwood to Maugerville.”

A wangan or wanigan box was a large chest in which New Brunswick lumberjacks kept clothing, pipes, tobacco, and other camp necessities.

Out west, logging company stores were called wanigans where the logger could buy bush clothes and supplies.

During the gold rushes, wanigan was used to name a one-room shed on skids that was used as instant accommodation in boom towns. Up north, huts mounted on sleds with runners and towable by Bombardiers were called wanigans.

Another use of this all-purpose term can be found in a 1966 western edition of Eaton’s Fall & Winter Catalogue: “Natural sheepskin wannigans for wear under overboots.” This wannigan is a short-laced, leather-soled boot. Adaptable wear. Adaptable word.

* The picture at the very top of this entry is a new wanigan made by the West Coast Canoe Company (Handcrafted Cedar Canvas Canoes). Contact Larry Bowers, proprietor  1-800-446-1588 or local 250-287-7348.

Bill Casselman

Copyright © 2013 William G Casselman

 

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The Canadian Word CRUMMY is sourced

Bill Casselman's

Canadian Word of the Day

Riding in a Crummy

Crummy meaning ‘lousy, of poor quality’ derives from an extension in mid-nineteenth century American English of crumb ‘body louse.’

But here’s another, originally Canadian meaning of crummy. In British Columbian logging areas, from the late 1930s, a crummy was an old box car or caboose in which loggers were transported from towns to the current cutting site at the logging camp.

A bit later, beat-up buses and trucks used to haul forest labourers were crummies.

Now in British Columbia crummy can mean a school bus, or any vehicle that carries workers to and from distant work sites. This usage has spread southward into the states of Washington and Oregon too.

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