Ikta Dale McCreery yaka t’ɬap (Part 10: seriously, don’t say “musum” in Northern Dialect unless you mean busy-ness!)
Another great bit of Northern Dialect spotted in the wild by our linguist friend, Dr. Dale McCreery.
From the Bella Coola area of British Columbia’s coast, Dale shared this on the Facebook “Chinook Jargon” group —
Sleep Stick, order it online (image credit: My Sleep Stick)
March 4, 2014: Couple examples – started out work today throwing back and forth a few remembered sentences in CJ: I said
- “naika kloosh musm” – and I was understood to be saying I have an erection
[nayka łúsh músum, ‘I well sleep’ but also ‘I have a good (hard) penis’]- – halo musm – can’t get it up,
[hílu músum, ‘not sleeping’ but also ‘no (erect) penis’]- naika musm, my penis.
[nayka músum, ‘I slept’ but also ‘my (erect) penis’]So there’s a semantic shift for you – [from] ‘sleep’, to ‘penis’.
I knew this was already somewhat of a thing based on reading Dave’s thesis, but hadn’t thought it would be quite so complete of a shift.
[Dave Robertson again:]
This was news to me, too.
We definitely know of musum ‘sleep’ having become strongly associated with ‘having sex’ about the time that the Northern Dialect started to take shape, 1850’s onwards. Pacific Northwest folk songs and poetry rely on this meaning, for entertainment value.
And we knew musum could also be a noun for ‘intercourse’, especially in the Diminutive form tənəs-musum, which is also a pretty good pun, ‘little sleep’.
But we weren’t aware that musum could also be a noun, all by itself, for ‘penis’. From Alexander F. Chamberlain’s field notes out of southeastern BC, we just have the compound form, musum-stik (‘sleep/sex-stick’) for ‘penis’.
I think we’ve all learned something today.
