1917 BC Xmas card!
Click here for other Chinook Jargon Christmas stories, but…
Today: “A member of the Times staff received a Christmas card”.
And everyone argued over it!
I wish we had a picture of the card in question.
(Here’s a link to more about the 2nd Canadian Mounted Rifles on my website. That unit had many connections with Chinook Jargon.)
A member of the Times staff received a
Christmas card from an officer of the 2nd
Canadian Mounted Rifles with the words
“Quansum Ilep” inscribed on the corner, says
the Victoria Times. The motto read like a
new one and became very mysterious when it
failed to respond to first-aid Latin or the glos-
sary of classic phrases in the back of the aver-
age dictionary. Thereupon expert assistance
was invoked. Erudite citizens searched their
memories and text-books, dug into root origins
and declared themselves baffled. One sug-
gested that it was a Gaelic expression, but ar-
dent Gaels scoffed at the idea. It was alto-
gether too pronounceable. Another thought is
might be Welsh, but the facile concurrence of
vowels furnished prima facie evidence to the
contrary, especially in view of the fact that it
was possible to pronounce both words without
straining the vocal cords. It occurred to some
that the 2nd C. M. R. had taken to Esperanto,
the new universal language, of which a great
deal was heard before the war, thereby flaunt-
ing its linguistic heterodoxy in the eyes of the
Anglo-Saxon world. Finally the mystery was
solved. “Quansum Ilep” is not Latin, dead
or alive, obsolete or serviceable, slang or cul-
tured. Neither is it a Greek expletive dug
up from the battle-ground of Troy. It is
neither Hebrew, Sanscrit nor Arabic, while
all the polyglot empire of the Hapsburgs can
not establish claim to it. It is our own Chinook,
the agency through which our first families
traded & thousand dollars worth of furs for a
twenty-five dollar rifle with our highly-com-
mercialized white man. It means “Always to
the Front,” and therefore is a motto most ap-
propriate to the battalion which has adopted
it. We congratulate the 2nd C. M. R. on its
British Columbianism.
— from the Grand Forks (BC) Grand Forks and Kettle Valley Orchardist of January 19, 1917, page 2, columns 1-2
