Happy Boxing Day (?)

[Mike Cleven]

Huh? - all you Boston tillikums must be going.  Up here in Canada, it's
Boxing Day, an official holiday apparently dedicated to the pursuit of
half-price electronic goods......tomorrow is Wrestling Day, but that's
another story......

I wanted to throw out to both the Chinook and Salishan mailing lists a
kid's saying from "the Shuswap Country" up here in BC.  NB that term
doesn't mean the Secwepemc traditional territory (which includes the
Cariboo) but rather the lakes and valleys east of Kamloops up to the
Monashee Mountains.  My friend Bruce was raised in Chase, which is on
little Shuswap Lake and has a large Shuswap First Nation community, which I
remember the name of as Squilax, although I'm sure the preferred
orthography is now much more elaborate.....

Anyway, the phrase he remembered as having been taught to him by the Indian
kids he played with was:

"Goosa with a goos-goos poops" - supposedly meaning "you have a stinky butt".

Didn't make any sense when he first told it to me a year or so ago, but on
reflection it seemed pretty obvious that "goosa" was a corruption or
altered rendering of "cosho" and that "poops" was probably originally
"opoots", either adapted by the influence of English or by Bruce's own
non-native memory into "poops".  So the phrase would _seem_ to be
originally Jargon, although maybe there's some Secwepemc I'm unfamiliar
with that is more direct - which is why I'm sending this to the Salishan
listserve.

If it's Jargon, this leaves "goos-goos", which perhaps is a variation on
"cosho", i.e. "piggish", "pig-like", or it may be a corruption (or bad
memory on Bruce's part) of "cultus".  In either case, the unvoiced 'c'
would have sounded like a "g" to Bruce's untrained ear.....

Comments?

There's a tune that goes with it, I think; I'll have to pick Bruce's brain
about next time I talk to him.....

Regards