Chinook saw
I’m blogging this for the name “Chinook saw”.
This was a mystery we discussed 16 years ago on the CHINOOK listserv.
The phrase “Chinook saw” turns up in the Thompson River Salish dictionary, as the English gloss for a Salish term mnuʔsáqs tk nx̣aʔƛ̓ús. (Literally something like ‘the both-ends scalloped-faced-thing’.)
Now that the internet has matured some, I’ve located images of the real hot item.
It’s a trade name: the Simonds “Royal Chinook no. 503” crosscut saw. (Simonds is still in business.)
I imagine “Chinook saw” meant that the tool ripped through a log like the famous Chinook wind eats up the snow in an eyeblink.
Chinook Jargon for this two-man saw, according to Father Le Jeune, was what he spelled in shorthand as kros kyut so 🙂
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Here’s a piece of spurious folk etymology for CJ saw. I think it was in Gibbs but I don’t have a copy anymore to check. If memory serves, a two-man cross-cut saw was lagwin, purportedly from Fr slang for lesbian, la gouine, according to the Fr Wikitionnaire, “terme lesbophobe”. The words does go back to the 15th c, but. apparently didn’t come to mean female homosexual until the 19th https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/gouine. Which I think rules it out of voyageur French, putting it in the camp of philological fantasy 😉
Never knew about the Gibbs reference to the cross cut saw. I have a couple of in my garage and have cut up wood with 3rd graders and for myself. The two teeth make the cut in the wood, the three teeth wipe out the wood. You can get a good rhythm going between you and the other bucker on the other end by pushing the saw back and forth. Old time loggers said that when the strips of wood that came out, you were making noodles. You know that you are making good when the saw goes back and forth smoothly.
The name of the saw has nothing to do with French slang. There is a kind of saw called “une scie égoïne”. If referring to a specific saw you could say “l’égoïne” (the saw) which sounds somewhat like “la gouine”.
Wikipedia.fr says this is the type of saw used for cutting branches (with one handle). The English counterpart is longer and only says “handsaw” but describes it in greater detail.
Merci, Marie-Lucie. I’d forgotten égoïne, even though I had it in Making Wawa, p. 94.
There was also Barbara P. Harris’ article, “Handsaw or Harlot: Some problem etymologies in the lexicon of Chinook Jargon.” Canadian Journal of Linguistics 28(1): 25-32. A good piece. We had fun discussing it with her as a guest in the Chinook Jargon course that I taught at UVic.