With Grenfell on the LabradorWaldo, Fullerton L. (Fullerton Leonard)
History
With Grenfell on the Labrador
Waldo, Fullerton L. (Fullerton Leonard)
Grenfell, Wilfred Thomason, Sir, 1865-1940
“I find my kinkhorn and I can’t glutch” means “I have a pain in my
throat and I can’t swallow.” The kinkhorn is the Adam’s apple. A man at
Chimney Cove remarked: “I have a pain in my kinkhorn and it has gone to
my wizen (chest).”
A dog is often called a “crackie.” Caribou is shortened to “boo.” A door
that has stuck is said to be “plimmed up.” A man who ate hard bread and
drank water said “It plimmed up inside and nearly killed me.”
To say of a girl that she “blushed up like a bluerag” refers to the
custom of enclosing a lump of blueing in a cloth when laundering
clothes. “The wind baffles round the house” is a beautiful way of saying
that it was blustering.
“Bruise” is a very popular dish of hard bread boiled with fish, and with
“scrunchins” (pork) fried and put over it. It is the equivalent of
Philadelphia’s famous “scrapple.” A guide, admitting that bread and tea
are the staple articles of diet in many an outpost, said reflectively:
“Yes, that’s all those people live on. Now there’s other things. There’s
beans.”
When a man says that his hands are “hard afrore” (hard frozen) we
remember Milton in “Paradise Lost,” “the air burns frore.” Frozen
potatoes are “frosty tiddies.” Head is often called “heed.” “Tigyer,”
said by an old man to a mischievous lad, means “Take yerself off.” “Is
en?” is a way of saying “Is he?” An old man cut his finger and said that
he had a “risen” on it, which is certainly more of a finality than a
“rising.” “I’m going chock to Gargamelle” means “I’m going all the way
to Gargamelle,” the latter name from “garçon gamelle,” said to signify
“the boy who looks after the soup.”
Instead of “squashed,” “squatted” is a common word, as in the expression
“I squatted my finger.” And there are many other provincialisms not in
the dictionaries.
The fathom is a land-measure of length, as well as a sea-measure of
depth. The leading dog of a team is six or seven “fathoms” ahead of the
komatik.
“Start calm” means perfectly calm, and then they may say expressively
“The wind’s up and down the mast.”
“Puddick” is a common name for the stomach.
“Take it abroad” is “take it apart”; “do you relish enough,” is “have
you eaten plenty?” “Poor sign fish” means that fish are scarce. Woods
that are tall are said to be “taunt.”
These few examples of distinctive phraseology might be multiplied a
thousand-fold.
As for the proper names, a fascinating field of research lies before a
patient investigator who commands the leisure. Here are but a few of
countless examples that might be cited.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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