Know Here from Siccum

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yes, hello. This is Mark Weller calling.

Hi, Mark. Where are you calling us from?

I’m calling from Liberty Lake, Washington State.

What can we do for you?

My dad, who has passed away, would have a favorite saying that he would say. If he didn’t agree with someone or feel like they knew what they were talking about, he would say, you don’t know Sikkim. And we always understood, you know, what that meant just by the way he used it. But we started thinking, gee, where did that word siccum come from? So that’s why we call him in.

And is he from Washington State as well?

Yes, he was.

Okay.

And so the idea was you don’t know anything. You don’t know nothing. Bupkus. You don’t know nothing. You don’t know siccum.

Interesting.

Wow, this is good. And there’s a story behind it.

Well, a small one.

Grant’s eyes are lighting up, Mark.

Well, what you’ve got there, Mark, is a shorter form of a longer phrase. And it’s put a couple different ways in the historical record. But usually it’s, he doesn’t know come here from Sikkim. And the Sikkim is the Sikkim that you would say to a dog. And Sikkim itself is a corruption of seek them. And it would mean to follow, go after. In the modern use, it almost always means to attack, right? Or to fight with them. So what you might be talking about if you say that somebody doesn’t know come here from Sikkim is you’re talking about a dog that doesn’t know how to obey commands. But the whole thing has kind of been shortened to just Sikkim, and it’s so far removed from its etymological and historical roots that Sikkim is spelled a wide variety of ways, and it doesn’t even look like the command that you might give a dog. It’s like S-I-C-C-U-M or S-I-C-C-E-M.

How about that?

Yeah, so how do you spell the command you give a dog?

The command you give a dog is usually spelled S-I-C space apostrophe E-M.

Oh, SICM.

So SICM, short for seek them. And the reason I asked where your father was from and why I’m so delighted that you are both from Washington State is that this term is largely found in the northwest of the United States. It’s got a regional component to it. And we’d love that because as a national radio show, we like to take your regional term and introduce it to the rest of the country. Welcome. You know what I’m saying?

What do you think about that, Mark?

Very interesting. That makes total sense. He was a big Latin scholar and would always have these Latin sayings he would throw out as we were growing up. So I didn’t think it had a real Latin kind of base. But it does sound a little bit like it, right?

It does. You don’t know thus.

Well, Mark, now you do know Sikkim.

All right. Well, thank you for clearing that.

Take care, Mark. Thank you for calling.

Great history there, Grant.

Yeah, you know, the language is filled with these wells that you need only bring a bucket. And what you will bring up will be the freshest water that you’ve ever tasted.

That’s beautiful. Where’s the Kleenex?

877-929-9673 is the number to call to talk about language.