"Mocotaugan" Stumps Dictionary editor
Dawn Ostrem
Northern News Services
Yellowknife (Oct 30/00) - The Canadian Oxford Dictionary people were looking for information about a word -- mocotaugan.
It all started with an e-mail from Katherine Barber, the dictionary's editor-in-chief.
"The Oxford English Dictionary is working on an entry for mocotaugan, a kind of knife with an upcurving blade used in making snowshoes, fur stretchers, canoes and woodwork," she wrote.
"Obviously it's not really something that is part of southern Canadian urban culture ... but that doesn't mean it's not being used somewhere."
An intent British reader came upon the word, highlighted it and sent it across the water to Barber.
"They mailed it to me and we have to determine if this word is still used," she said. She, in turn, sent out the e-mail that travelled far and wide as recipients forwarded it along.
News/North received the e-mail and decided to help in the search.
Contacted first off was Billy Day, an outdoorsman from Inuvik.
"It sounds like language from down south," said the Inuvialuit hunter.
"It sounds maybe Dogrib? But I doubt it, it's probably something further south."
So south we went.
Contacted next was the Northern Lights Special Care Home in Fort Smith and in one simple step the search seemed to have ended.
Nurse Cheryl Comin, turned Oxford dictionary investigator, asked one resident about the word and he sent her directly to Cree expert Louis Beaver.
"I didn't talk English for quite a few years, not until I was 16 or so," Beaver said of his credentials as he thought about the word.
"Mocotaugan?" he said several times, enunciating it in different ways.
"That would be the knife," he said, finally.
Beaver has a simple answer for the dictionary people:
"Sometimes I use that word, if I'm talking Cree," Beaver said.
"But in English it's a crooked knife."
