A couple of CJ - to - English loans?

[Mike Cleven]

At 08:44 PM 12/4/98 -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.
>
>Here's the sub-entry from the OED:
>
>THE STICKS: a remote, thinly populated, rural area; the backwoods;
>hence, in extended (freq. depreciatory) use, any area that is off the
>beaten track or thought to be provincial or unsophisticated; esp. in
>phr. in the sticks. orig. U.S.
>1905 N. Davis *Northerner* 78 Billy is a cane-brake nigger; he’ll take
>to the sticks like a duck to water when he’s scared.
>1914 R. Lardner in *Sat. Even. Post* 7 Mar. 8/1, I will have to slip you
>back to the sticks [i.e. the minor baseball leagues].
>1921 *Daily Colonist* (Victoria, B.C.) 22 Oct. 11/3 Judge Landis..has
>not yet consigned Babe Ruth to oblivion for..playing in the sticks for
>exhibition money.
>1926 Whiteman & McBride *Jazz* xiii. 254 They had..all the real New
>Yorker’s prejudice against ‘the sticks’.
>[...and several more recent citations]
>
>The vernacular tone of the 1905 quot. gives "the sticks" the feel of an
>autochthonous S.E. U.S. expression; conversely, the 1921 quot. from B.C.
>feels allochthonous to me. And note that the citation Barbara mentions
>is from a Toronto newspaper. (Not very convincing to y'all, I know!)

I agree with you about the 1921 quote; the phraseology is more how we'd use
the term around here.  But again, all of these are post-Klondike, which I
believe may have been the "point of entry" into the lexicon of the
English-speaking world beyond the Northwest; on the other hand, it could
date from the days of the railways being punched through, or even the use
of Jargon in the California goldfields in 1849.  The comment below seems
quite on the mark - but again, even the maritime use of "sticks" for masts
and spars could be of specifically Northwest/Jargon origin; and/or the
Jargon word may have been learned from sailors.

>
>Note that "sticks" has long been used by English-speaking sailors for
>masts, yards, etc.

Any idea on a date of provenance for this usage?  If it's pre-1790 or so
then this _would_ be a usage of maritime origin - _but_ would then be the
source for the native adoption of the English word "stick" to mean
"tree(s)" and "wood".  It's worth noting that the forests of Burrard Inlet
and Elliot Bay and so forth were the source of the mainmasts and spars for
the larger-and-larger sailing ships of the 1800s, and according to one
source I have somewhere (a biography of Gassy Jack) the famous windjammer
fleets of the American merchant fleets of the mid-19th Century would have
been impossible without the trees taken from the current site of the City
of Vancouver; the same being true of the Royal Navy, and of the Royal
Navy's interest in the region (as expressed by the continuation of the
British presence in the form of Fort Douglas=Victoria).  What I'm getting
at is that "sticks" was applied to the standing trees by the sailors to
refer to prospective mast-material, and picked up by the native users of
the Jargon to mean simply "tree" or "wood"......