Is Saint Onge’s < lakom shush > ‘overshoes’ legit?
In Louis-Napoleon St Onge’s handwritten dictionary that I’m editing, he has this entry for “overshoes”: lakom shush.
Gumshoe, the world’s first shoes made of recycled chewing gum (image credit: Industry Leaders Magazine)
That’s a calque on English “gumshoes”, of course.
But interestingly…
… St Onge is using a different sense of “gum” than Chinook Jargon’s “lakóm“, which is actually the gum that is “tree pitch”.
(My dad always told me pine pitch is “Boy Scout chewing gum” 😊)
Saint Onge’s thinking there was that the rubber that overshoes are made of is “gum” — which is true — but only in English.
In fact, that English sense of gum shows up loaned into a number of Pacific NW tribal languages of the Salish Sea area as kəmputs, “boots”, from (I say British) English “gumboots”, which implies it was a Chinook Jargon word too. (The more widely known CJ term is stik-shush, “forest shoes”.)
Compare this with all other known uses of lakom. They prove my point. Everywhere except in this one phrase of St O’s, lakom is “pitch”, “sap”, and the like. It’s used in lakom-stik “conifer”…
But as Ngram Viewer reports, “gum boot(s)” and “gum shoe(s)” were common enough expressions in English around 1890, when St Onge was doing a lot of the editing on his dictionary.
His entry for “overshoes” isn’t the only item I find in his manuscript that makes me think he was adding a few phrases in the spirit of “Well, how would we say that in Chinuk Wawa?”
It’s good to have an awareness that not everything in a dictionary is accurate! 🙂
