🤣 “Chinook” and “schnook”?!
The always valuable ADS-L email discussion list made me aware this week of a post-frontier US English variant on “chinook” salmon.
Mr. Le Schnook Luigi (image credit: Encyclopedia Spongebobia)
This was in a discussion of the origin of the insulting US English word “schnook”.
The term “schnook salmon” appears to have been known well enough that it was used in newspaper ads along the Northern Tier of inland US states — at least from Montana to Michigan.
It uses the pronunciation “sh(ə)nυk” that we now hear all the time for the “Chinook” wind and so forth.
The published spelling “schnook” betrays little or no knowledge of a connection with “Chinook”, wouldn’t you say?
Quoting directly from one post at ADS-L:
On Tue, Jan 16, 2024 at 11:15 PM Laurence Horn <laurence.horn@yale.edu>
wrote:> For the uninitiated, there is in fact no etymological relation between
> “Chinook” (a variety of salmon named for the indigenous people once living
> along the Columbia River) and “schnook” (apparently from the Yiddish
> “shnuk”, an elephant’s trunk, whence(?) a sucker or dupe). A phonological
> connection, yes, but semantic, not so much.
>
> LH
>
>
> > On Jan 16, 2024, at 8:18 PM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000@GMAIL.COM>
> wrote:
> >
> > 1920: O[xford]E[nglish]D[ictionary]
> >
> > 1916 _Boston Herald_ (Apr. 26) 9: Al Keough and Joe Cohan gave a funny
> > sketch called “The Live One and the Schnook.”
> >
> > Cf.
- 1891 _Daily Independent_ (Helena, Mont.) (May 28) 5: Lake Superior trout, white, black bass, pike, schnook, salmon.
- 1913 _Curtis [Neb.] Enterprise_ (March 21) 3: SALMON–Adams sells the best schnook for 11c.
- 1916 _Kalamazoo Gazette_ (May 24) 4: Baked Fresh Caught Schnook* Salmon
–Menu Card / *Restaurant English for Chinook.
> If there’s any connection, it could be via the once common “poor fish.”
Never in my life had it occurred to me to link the spelling “schnook” with salmon! But sure enough, a Google Books search reveals serious written use of the term, by educated biologists no less, at least as early as 1960.
I just watched the Season 6 Episode 21 “The Great Snow” of the Beverly Hillbillies and the bad pun of “Chinook” vs. “Schnook” was used: Jane Hathaway was impersonating a Chinook native American and her boss Milburn Drysdale mispronounced this as “Schnook”—this bad pun was repeated several times during the episode.
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