Salutations, wisdom wickers! And thank you for joining us for another episode of An Assemblage of Grandiose and Bombastic Grandiloquents. Get your oars out and start a-rowing, because today’s word is: weequashing.
Weequashing is the spearing of fish or eels by torchlight from canoes, as in, ‘Jennifer, make sure you get the torch out of the garage, I want to go weequashing tonight!’ Weequash is derived from the word ‘wigwas’, an Algonquin word meaning ‘birch-bark’, which is likely to refer to the type of torch used by Native Americans when hunting after dark. Eventually, weequashing began applying to any hunting or fishing tip carried out by torchlight. A letter written by a Massachusetts resident in 1792 described the following: ‘Great Neck in Mashpee is a place famous for eels. The Indians, when they go in a canoe with a torch, to catch eels in the night, call it weequash.’
Similarly, ‘neeskotting’ is the spearing or gaffing of fish in shallow water at night with the aid of a lantern or torch, the ’spear’ being a long pole with a hook at the end. Well that’s rather specific, isn’t it? You wouldn’t want to misuse that word. How incredibly silly if you said, ‘Mum, we’ll be right back, we’re just going neeskotting down at the beach!’ Ha! You should instead say, ‘Mum, have you seen my lantern lately? We want to take the canoe out neeskotting so we can bring home some speared fish for dinner.’ Much better.
Some other fascinating Native American words include ‘podunk’, defined as an imaginary place in burlesque writing or speaking’; ‘killhag’ which is the name of a sort of wooden trap used by hunters; and ‘cockarouse’, which signified a person of distinction; a chief or
elder. The latter seems to be a corruption of ‘cawcawwassough’, which according to Captain John Smith signified ‘elder’ in the language of Virginia.
Isn’t language wonderful?
Written by Taylor Davidson, Read by Zane C Weber
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