For reasons I won't trouble you with, I was recently compiling a list of synonyms for 'testicle.' After exhausting the biological (gonad, testis) and the edible (mountain oyster, prairie oyster), I started recruiting help on the slang. (Any ideas welcome at the address below. But please make clear whether you mean them as suggestions for my list or as literary criticism of my article.) One friend offered a story she had heard recently from a Mohawk woman.

When white explorers came off their boats looking for sex, they overcame the language barrier by gesturing to their testicles. The Mohawk men, helpfully, replied, "Squaw," the word for men's genitalia. If dirty language was what it took to get these thugs interested in learning, then so be it. Hence, whenever the word was later used derogatorily, the white men were insulting their own balls.

Sadly, as good a reclamation story as this may be, it doesn't convince the linguists, who trace the word back to the Algonquin and Assiniboine for 'woman.' It sounds more like a twist on another folk derivation of the word, which has it as a bastardized version of the Mohawk word for female genitalia, thus making the term doubly offensive.

Folk etymologies float all around us, and investigating them tends to be a balloon-puncturing exercise. The stories are usually not true. Two other friends just told me earnestly that golf originates in clubhouses that hung signs inscribed with the phrase, "Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden." A while ago, at a sombre pot-luck, a group of us mourned the death of the word 'picnic,' now unusable due to its history of racial-hatred-and-lunch jaunts in the southern states (details easily available online, but don't bear repeating here). Gorp (and I was so fond of this one, and believed it) is a mixture of Good Ol' Raisins and Peanuts. All of these explanations are, for want of a better word, bollocks.

Golf may either come from the Dutch word for a stick or club (introduced to Scotland by Dutch traders. Naturally, you would name your favourite game after a foreign word used by people who sell things to you.) or from the Scottish exclamation 'gauf' meaning something like 'oof' or 'thwack.' Picnics, or rather written evidence of them, began in the 18th century, cropping up in the letters of Lord Chesterfield in 1748. The French, always first at the table with any decent trend, started having 'pique-nique's as early as 1694, so-called because 'piquer' means to peck and 'nique' is something of little value. French aristocrats would haul out people they didn't consider very important and feed them to the chickens. No, they wouldn't. The pique-nique was just a potluck, until some bright spark thought of doing it outside on a sunny day. And gorp began as a verb meaning 'to eat greedily' before being booted upstairs to the House of Nouns.

One response to spurious etymologies is to tut-tut at people's laziness in believing them, when it really isn't difficult to check these things in a dictionary. Another is to enjoy the game of it, and invent more. (On a hike once, Anicka Quin and I followed the logic of the words 'penultimate' (almost-but-not-quite ultimate) and 'peninsula' (almost-but-not-quite an island) to come up with a good explanation of 'penis.' But enough of the
genitalia topic.) A third way (and there is one! there is one!) is to see the practice sympathetically as something like the writing of creation stories. Language is unruly and flummoxing as nature, and like nature it is also a kind of home. No wonder that people try to make a pet of it, or let's say a nest, by picking favourite words like twigs and binding them together tenuously.

Perhaps the smart way is the scientific, face-the-evidence methodology of linguists and lexicographers. Certainly these are the right people to put together dictionaries. But a person's vocabulary is not simply a concise edition of a dictionary; it's a bearing wall of personality. We should be allowed to choose and keep some stories that satisfy us because to have an illusion of control over one part of our environment allows to face the rest more boldly.

Even it is just a load of family jewels, I'm keeping my good ol' raisins and peanuts. It's a very good reason to call trail mix 'gorp.' The circularity and goofiness of it comforts me on my hikes through the wilderness. And for similar reasons, I wish the squaw story some luck in its journey through Canadian conversations. It deserves live in our culture alongside the scientific derivation by virtue of being a good tale amid so many bad ones.

Tom Howell deserves to live as a good fellow. Amid so many.