Note 92 — INDIAN GEOGRAPHICAL NAMES.

"Whiskey Jack," the name by which the Canada Jay (Perisoreus Canadensis) is best known to the lumbermen and hunters of Maine and Canada, is the Montagnais Ouishcatchan (Cree, Ouiskeshauneesh), which has passed perhaps through the transitional forms of 'Ouiske Jean' and 'Whiskey Johnny.' The Shagbark Hickory nuts, in the dialect of the Abnakis called s'k[oo]skada´mennar, literally, 'nuts to be cracked with the teeth,' are the 'Kuskatominies' and 'Kisky Thomas' nuts of descendants of the Dutch colonists of New Jersey and New York. A contraction of the plural form of a Massachusetts noun-generic,—asquash, denoting 'things which are eaten green, or without cooking,' was adopted as the name of a garden vegetable,—with conscious reference, perhaps, to the old English word squash, meaning 'something soft or immature.' Sometimes etymology overreaches itself, by regarding an aboriginal name as the corrupt form of a foreign one. Thus the maskalongé or 'great long-nose' of the St. Lawrence (see p. 43) has been reputed of French extraction,—masque elongé: and sagackomi, the northern name of a plant used as a substitute for or to mix with tobacco,—especially, of the Bearberry, Arctostaphylos uva-ursi,—is resolved into sac-à-commis, "on account of the Hudson's Bay officers carrying it in bags for smoking," as Sir John Richardson believed (Arctic Searching Expedition, ii. 303). It was left for the ingenuity of a Westminster Reviewer to discover that barbecue (denoting, in the language of the Indians of Guiana, a wooden frame or grille on which all kinds of flesh and fish were dry-roasted, or cured in smoke,) might be a corruption of the French barbe à queue, i.e. 'from snout to tail;' a suggestion which appears to have found favor with lexicographers.