Tag Archive: chuck

What engineers must know in British Columbia

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Chinuk Wawa shows up in a funny place: American Machinist magazine.  (February 2, 1884, page 3.)  In the middle of a serious discussion of Root’s new boiler design, they throw in some lighter-weight filler.  “What… Continue reading

Sluiskin’s warning! Kloshe nanich!

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(Notice how I’m indulging in exclamations this week?!)

I preached the first sermon at White Salmon…in English anyway

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“Early Days at White Salmon and the Dalles”, by Camilla Thomson Donnell. Washington Historical Quarterly IV(1) [January 1913], pages 105-115. Page 109: Rev. Mr. Tenney gave me this incident. He said: “I preached the… Continue reading

Mika tum-tum hyass t’kop (oh brother)

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Just to bring alive for you one of the uses we talk about the Jargon having–a “token of pioneer identity”, a “badge of Northwesternness”–I give you the following correspondence, nine letters that were… Continue reading

Blazing the way, by Emily Denny

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Blazing the Way: Or, true stories, songs and sketches of Puget Sound and other pioneers. By Emily Inez Denny. Seattle: Rainier Printing Company, Inc. 1909. I enjoyed noticing on page 33 of this… Continue reading

Lines by a klootchman

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From the Steilacoom (Washington Territory) Puget Sound Herald, Friday, October 14, 1859, front page I reckon. This one’s what was in early 1960s pop music called an “answer song” 🙂 (If you don’t… Continue reading

Cruisings in the Cascades

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Looking through an antiquarian bookseller’s website, I spied a neat-sounding book that was new to me. They wanted a shocking price, but Google Books had it as a free ebook 🙂 Turns out… Continue reading

A trip to Metaline

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To paraphrase Daniel Johnston, have you been to Metaline?  If you had visited that mining camp on the BC border in Washington’s first year of statehood, you might have found Chinook Jargon useful.… Continue reading

The “Chinook lingo”

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With a pidgin language, it’s perhaps more important than elsewhere to explicitly recognize the basilect. Pidgins hardly have ‘high’ forms. And they’re used in what the highfalutin folks see as pretty low places.… Continue reading

Chinook Jargon songs, part 3

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From the same book as parts 1 and 2 (page 66): found in the 1864-1867 diary of Arthur S. Farwell, ‘later Surveyor-General’ for BC.  (See also part 1, part 2 and part 4.)