A couple of CJ - to - English loans?

[Jeffrey Kopp]

I believe some idioms may come into use by parallel or circular routes,
which makes tracking their origins by a tree-structured method difficult
or misleading.  When you consider how much people travel and how many
languages are spoken, it's not such a stretch that by chance similar
terms (or similar-sounding ones) come from different directions to merge
at some point in history.

The sailor connection rings a bell with me.  Sailors have a colorful,
obscure, archaic and highly developed vernacular.  When I was in the
Coast Guard I marveled at the argot; many modern technical and
operational acronyms are combined with age-old sea and military
expressions (and many ancient profane oaths) to create a unique dialect
as big or bigger than the Jargon.  Among a close group who know each
other well (such as shipmates on long deployments), perhaps 10-30% of
conversation heard can come from it.  I thought of recording some of it
and since have often dearly wished I had.

Many expressions, mostly the operational acronym-based, are quite
service-specific.  Some of ours would puzzle Navy sailors ("the squids")
and Marines ("jarheads")--and vice versa.   (To be fair, to them we were
the "knee-deeps" or "tarheads.")

Since the first version of the Jargon to include English was spoken
between sailors and the Nootkas, a nautical source for "sticks" makes
sense.  A sailor calls a mast or a tree a "stick," the Indians then
describe forests to them as "stick land" or "stick country," (with a
side trip making any wood object into a "stick something"), and it
eventually comes back in the public meaning "the remote woods" or "the
boondocks."  Such use in the Jargon probably reinforced and perpetuated
if not extended the previously exclusively or mostly nautical use of
this term in English speakers.

The term "stick" then likely has a maritime origin, but its meaning of
"tree" further extended to "forest" could most probably be credited to
the Jargon.  So where the term "originated" is a judgment call.

(We called the mast "the stick," but I never connected it to wood as
ours was made of aluminum!  On a modern ship it's just an elevated
support for radio and radar antennae.)

Another somewhat incongruous explanation for the use of "sticks" I once
heard attributed it to the River Styx, in reference to "the end of all"
or "the outer edge."  The confusion of "sticks" with this homonym
probably propelled its usage a bit further.

Regards,

Jeff

On Fri, 4 Dec 1998 20:44:31 -0600, you wrote:

>Mike & Barbara,
>
>I certainly admit the possibility of a CJ etymology for "the sticks".
>Until some early Northwest evidence shows up, though, I think it'll be
>difficult to prove. Does anyone know of a CJ example of "sticks" in the
>sense of 'bush, interior'? If not, there's a crucial link missing from
>the etymology.
>
>Note that "sticks" has long been used by English-speaking sailors for
>masts, yards, etc.
>
>Regards,
>Alan