A couple of CJ - to - English loans?

[Mike Cleven]

At 02:34 PM 10/28/98 -0600, Alan H. Hartley wrote:
>> Do we know if the English term "the sticks" maybe came from the
>> Jargon?  It's a synonym for "in the country; in the backwoods; the toolies
>> / Thules (sp?)"  When I think of the term "stick Indian" which almost
>> surely is from Chinook Jargon, it leads my mind this way.
>
>The earliest records of *sticks* in this sense in the OED are from 1905 &
>1914, neither from a context suggesting a Pacific NW origin. (One was the
Sat.
>Evening Post.) This certainly doesn't rule out a CJ origin, but it *does*
make
>it less likely.

I don't know if anyone else ever responded to this, but I wouldn't consider
the OED an authority on the possible origin of words in the Pacific
Northwest; things _do_ take a while to reach Angleterre from this neck of
the woods, after all - especially then.  That a few Jargon words and
Northwestern usages began reaching the cosmpolitan centres of anglo
civilization in the aftermath of the Klondike Gold Rush (which spread terms
such as "cheechako" around the world) should not be so surprising.  And -
to me - it's easy to see that if a Jargon speaker in, say, the 1870s, were
to refer to being out in the forest, they would say "I was in the sticks
today" or something of the kind.....that it took the dictionary publishers
this long to catch up with spoken English from the hinterland doesn't seem
surprising at all.....

Regards