Muckety-Muck, Muckymuck, Muckamuck

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Nisi calling from Laramie, Wyoming.

Hi, Nisi, welcome to the show.

Hi, I was walking with a co-worker the other day. I work on the campus of the University of Wyoming, but I work for the state of Wyoming. And he was talking about a groundbreaking event that was happening there, and they had sectioned off a bunch of parking. And we were kind of talking about that, and my co-worker says, yeah, that’s the parking for the mucky mucks. And I have used that word. I don’t remember the first time I heard the word. For some reason, it just, it struck me kind of like, huh, that’s funny. And I wonder what the origin is. And if there are different variations, is it something only specific to the West? So mucky muck. And so you took that to mean that the parking spaces belong to what, the administration or the head people?

Yeah, like the higher ups.

Higher ups.

And so the term that you both use is mucky muck?

Right, mucky muck.

Yeah, because there are a lot of different variations of it, like muck-a-muck or muck-muck. And it’s a term with a lot of history behind it. As far as we know, it goes back to the Chinook jargon of the Pacific Northwest. So interesting that you’re out sort of that way. And the Chinook jargon, it’s like a pidgin language, a language of the business. That’s a combination of Chinook and Salishan and Nutka, and also the English and French of people who were coming to that area to do business. And in that language, muckamuck means food or provisions. It also means to eat. And so you’ll find, particularly in the Northwest, that muckamuck is used to mean food.

Yeah, not commonly, but it’s there here and there. And then there was another term in the Chinook jargon that sounded like hayo or hayu, and it meant plenty. And apparently the term that sounded like hayomakamak was used in that jargon, meaning literally plenty to eat. But it referred to people who were particularly important or wealthy or also pompous, which is sort of at least the important part is what you’re talking about there.

Right, right.

I quickly looked up the word muck.

Yeah.

In the, I guess, the modern English dictionary, muck is referring to what happens on the bottom of a horse stall.

Yeah.

No, these are unrelated.

Yeah, that’s just the sound alike. But muckamuck, I know it as muckety-muck, by the way. So you mentioned something about pompousness.

That was my understanding, but a lot of times when people use it, it’s a little derogatory. You’re describing people who are very self-important, kind of full of themselves. Did you get that sense, Lucy?

That’s sort of the connotation that I guess maybe I have used. You just kind of refer to them, oh, the higher-ups who think they’re so much better than us.

Right.

Yeah, exactly. It is a little derogatory, but that is very, very fascinating.

Yeah, isn’t that great? So high muckamuck came to be used as a term for those kinds of people. And the fact that high, the English word high, meaning up above everybody else, is a word that just simply sounds like the Chinook. The word that means a lot.

Yeah, the word in Chinook jargon. Interesting. That is not at all what I had expected.

You were expecting us to get down in the muck, right?

In 1830s it enters English, right? Roughly, right?

Yeah.

About then?

Yeah.

Well, great.

Thanks a lot.

Yeah, pleasure.

Hi, Martha and Grant. I really appreciate your time today, and I really love the show.

Thank you very much.

Thanks for calling.

Okay, yeah.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

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