More humor in Chinuk Wawa: 1916, what a local person thought of the hectograph
A little more fun from “Kamloops Wawa” of March 1916 (No. 501), page [1]…
Again I’m grandfathering non-Jargon material into our humor category, as long as it involves Chinuk Wawa or comes, as it does today, from the “Chinook Paper”.
Researching this little post led me to realize that the mimeograph (which Kamloops Wawa’s Father Le Jeune used first for publishing that paper) and the hectograph (which he used much later) are not the same contraption. (While we’re parenthesizing, in between those eras, Le Jeune sent his handwritten master copies off “to Canada” to be printed by a photoengraving method.)
Image credit: Wikipedia
The funny encounter told of below happened 25 years after writing was introduced to the Indigenous communities of south-central British Columbia. The person speaking may have been quite old, as their comment echoes things said before Native people were familiar with literacy…
As you see the copy for this little magazine is
done up on a typewriter, and is then reproduced on
a Hektograph copying pad. [DDR: = hectograph, jellygraph, gelatin duplicator.]Somebody was lately watching me taking a few
copies of the Hektograph, and made the remark that
I must be trying to write something to be read
after I am dead / / / ! ! ! ? ? ?
The wacky punctuation that he ends with make me think Le Jeune, whose sense of humor and love of innovation were well-known, must have been reading the new genre of newspaper comic strips!!! *** @@@
