SKOOKUM - - - A MAGIC WORD FROM BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA

 

                                      A British Columbia Word

Long-time residents of British Columbia still toss the adjective skookum into their daily speech, nowadays chiefly as a bit of local linguistic colour.

Skookum means big and mighty in Chinook jargon, a lingua franca, a trading language based on the speech of the Chinook Indians, with words from French, English, Salish, Nootka and other local tongues thrown in as needed. Chinook jargon was used for over a hundred years until the turn of the century by aboriginal peoples and the white traders who plied the Pacific coast. Among some west-coast native peoples, skookum may refer to a big (and therefore evil) spirit force or devil.

SKOOKUMCHUCK, B.C.

Skookumchuck is a town in southeastern British Columbia , where Skookumchuck Creek empties into the Kootenay River.

Skookum = mighty and chuk=water or river in Chinook Jargon. Together the roots can mean ‘white water rapids.’ The word skookum came into Chinook Jargon from the Chahalis language where skukm meant ‘powerful, brave, or large.’


SALTCHUCK
The Chinook jargon word for water chuk came from Nuu-chah-nulth language where ch’a’ak is water. Another very common British Columbia use of this root pops up in the Chinook jargon word for the ocean, saltchuck. It is used in everyday speech to mean the ocean or any body of salt water like an ocean inlet or bay.

CHUCK
By itself too, chuck is used in informal language especially on the northern Pacific coast of North America as a colorful localism for any extensive body of water: a big lake, a fjord-like inlet of the ocean, and so forth.

SKOOKUM JIM

The adjective produced nicknames like Skookum Jim, one of seven men who discovered gold at Bonanza Creek on August 17, 1896 , at the start of the Klondike Gold Rush.

Skookum-house was a synonym for a jail on the Pacific coast.

Skookum tumtum meant a strong, brave heart. Tumtum was the sound of the heart beating, not a reference to the English nursery word for stomach.

Heehee tumtum was a merry heart.

Sick tumtum meant one was sad.

                                                Is this label racist?

Should you require proof that skookum remains an operative term, know that “Skookum” has recently been borrowed as the name of an online manga comic strip. Manga is the Japanese word for comics. Manga developed from a mixture of Japanese and Western styles of comic-book drawing, and took its current form in the late 1940s. The “Skookum” manga is sexist and fraught with bodily exaggeration. But manga-maniacs ought to check it out at www.skookumanga.com

 

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The eve of May Day in northern Europe is Walpurgisnacht, a sort of spring cleaning for witches. The witchlets whisk out the coven room and go flitting through the spring night to test drive new brooms and get maintenance done on winter-stored brooms. This Hexenritt or witches’ ride takes place on mountaintops. One fave peak is the Brocken in the Harz Mountains of central Germany. So, whether we  wished you recently Happy Walpurgisnacht or Happy May Day, here we choose to celebrate May with a spring wildflower familiar to Canadians and Americans, a leafy denizen of our eastern woodlands, the mayapple.

Weekending in the Haliburton Highlands of Central Ontario, the

botanizing wanderer finds sometimes a bounty of mayflowers and sometimes that mayapples are not up but, greeting the wanderer through awakening woods, may be Clintonia whose tiny white flowers dapple the oak-leaf rubble of the forest floor. Dog-Tooth Violets may reflex their slender yellow petals. The little charmer is also known as Trout Lily because of the mottling of its leaves, resembling the speckled flank of a brook trout. I keep a speckled trout flank nailed to the barn door in the country, strictly for purposes of comparison, lest even one metaphor go astray. Maroon-hued trilliums abound on moist uplands and may open and present their three-petalled stars to the spring sunshine. These trillums tend to open with a modest reddish blush and then turn dazzling white as they beckon their pollinators.

Genus Name of the Mayapple: Podophyllum, Botanical Latin, shortened from the original name in old botany, Anapodophyllum or “duckfoot leaf” = anas Greek 'duck' + pous, podos Greek 'foot' + phyllon Greek' leaf.'

The basal leaf does have a long, foot-like stem. The shape of the leaf could be said to resemble a duck’s webbed foot.

 
 
Barbarians, Berbers & Barberry

Family: Berberidaceae, the barberry family, perennial herbs and shrubs in about twelve genera, mostly of the northern temperate region < berberis Old French, one of the barberries < barbaris Latin, one of the shrubs < ultimately Barbaroi Greek, literally ‘stammerers,’ but any foreigner who could not speak Greek was a barbaros and was thus uttering baby-like nonsense syllables like ‘bar-bar.’ Bar-bar is how the ancient Greeks signified baby talk. It was the precise equivalent of English goo-goo.

This notion is of ancient Indo-European provenance. Consider barbaras Sanskrit for ‘stammering.’ A barberry-like shrub must have sometime come from North Africa or the Middle East. Note that Arabic borrowed the Greek term too, as al-Barbar, originally any people the Moors encountered who could not speak Arabic, notably the Berber people, whose name reflects this Arab prejudice. The Berber language is not Arabic. In English, of course, we still refer to barbarians.


PELTA & the Canadian Species

Mayapple possesses the pleasingly plosive appellation of Podophyllum peltatum. Peltatus is classical military Latin for ‘armed with a pelta.’ The pelta was the sturdy little shield, shaped like a half moon, carried by the Roman infantry whose armourers borrowed it from the pelte shield of the ancient Thracians. Each of the mayapple’s two large leaves vaguely resemble such a shield. A pelta was made of wood or wicker-work, covered with skin or leather and the soldier who carried such a shield was a peltast. Peltasts were a kind of light infantry employed by the ancient Greeks. As well as the pelte, these men wore quilted tunics and leather leggings. Usually their arms also included long spears and swords.

Common Name Misnomer

Like many common names of plants, mayapple is a slight misnomer, since the yellow fruit does not appear until later in the summer. But, when it did ripen enticingly, the mayapple sent pioneers and even

visiting explorers into dizzy dithyrambs of praise. Here is W. Ross King, author of The Sportsman and Naturalist in Canada (1866): “a delicious and refreshing wild fruit...about the size of a bantam’s egg...presents a mass of juicy pulp and seeds, not unlike pineapple in flavour.” Steady on, old man. Ripe fruit can be done up as preserves and added to jams and jellies too. Many moderns who have tasted it say mayapple berries are bland, acidic, and too pulpy.

 

Uses & Cautions

The leaves and roots are poisonous. The American Food & Drug Administration lists this plant as “unsafe to use.” But can one find its extracts for sale in some Canadian “health” stores? You bet! Just glug those toxins down your gullet, suckers!

Worth repeating: The ovoid yellow fruit of the mayapple is edible only when it is ripe. Before it ripens, the fruit is dangerous to consume. Mayapple plants adorn many poison lists and are listed in hospital emergency room poison therapy manuals. That ought to be proof sufficient, and yet every year children and healthfood nuts are admitted to medical care presenting with symptoms of mayapple poisoning.


Clinical Uses of Mayapple

While there are many dangerous folk remedies connected with extracts of mayapple, like its unadvised use as a purgative, pharmaceutical investigation has led to the clinical use of podophyllin, a resin from the mayapple, and podophyllotoxin and derivatives like epipodophyllotoxin. In 1977 podophyllin was the drug of choice in the treatment of venereal warts or condylomata acuminata. American medical literature reports that the Penobscot peoples of Maine treated certain cancers with an extract from the rhizome of the mayapple.

Compounds found in mayapple like alpha and beta peltatin are currently used in the treatment of certain cancers. And so the search goes on.

                         © 2013 William Gordon Casselman

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KIACK is 100% CANUCK: a Neat Nova Scotia Fish Word

Kiack is a rough-scaled, bony little fish called the alewife in English, and ki’ak in the Mi’kmaq language. It is fished during the spring salmon run when it comes up maritime rivers, particularly along Nova Scotia ’s South Shore. In Québec French it’s un gaspareau, which is an Acadian word, and Acadians gave the fish its French name. Gaspereau was the Acadian name for a lake just south of Kentville, Nova Scotia. Did the fish name come before the lake name, or vice versa? I don’t know. Perhaps a Nova Scotian Acadian reader can point us to the original?

Here’s an excerpt from the campaign diary of Arthur Bull who ran for the NDP in Nova West during the 2004 federal election.

“Fishing for Kiack: Finally, I visited a group of kiack fishermen down in Argyle. This was a new fishery to me. The kiack (also called gaspereau and alewife in other areas) is fished with a dip net out of small brooks in the Tusket River area. . .we proceeded to Kiack Brook. There was a small shelter with a stove, where some of the fishermen rest, while a couple of fishermen take turns dip-netting from two platforms on either side of the brook.” 

Etymology of Genus and Species Names

One zoological name of the little kiack is the daunting Pomolobus pseudoharengus. But when that jaw-breaker is broken into its Latin and Greek roots, it is a most appropriate name. Let’s examine Pomolobus first. Pomum is the Latin word for apple; pomo- is its combining form. Lobus in Late Latin meant earlobe, pod, capsule, round belly, and was itself borrowed from Classical Greek lobos, with similar meanings. Pseudos in Greek meant false. Harengus is the zoological Latin word for herring. So a pseudo-harengus is a false herring. And a pomolobous pseudoharengus is an apple-bellied false herring-like fish.

Pseudo - is widely used in modern English as a prefix to words denoting fakery and deception. A pseudonym is a false name (Greek onyma, name) often used by an author to disguise her or his real name. Pseudoscience is fake science; and, memorably, a Pseud is a phoney person, a pompous deceiver, a poseur, a professional “expert” of dubious expertise, of the type that television chat program producers find so convincing, unlike many in of their TV audience. Pseud as a word was coined and promulgated by Private Eye, the British satirical magazine. But it is merely a shortening of the noun pseudo ‘a pretentious person, a faker’ which has been in use as an English putdown for more than 500 years.

Kiack, Gaspereau, Alewive

Let us return to our little fish. By its zoological moniker then it’s an apple-bellied false herring. The fish does have a naturally big belly, and this gave the English common name too, an alewife being just what it looks like, a woman who kept an alehouse, sampled her brew copiously, and had a fat stomach. An ale wife might also have been a tavern customer, a wife overly fond of a foaming tankard of fermented ale.

 A more common zoological label for this fish is Alosa pseudoharengus. Alausa was a Late Latin word for a shad-like fish.

In Nova Scotia, kiack became an insult too. Kiack was a term of derision in early Nova Scotia for anyone who ate alewives, implying that they were poor, rustic, and could not afford to indulge in civilized “town” food. But, as a matter of fact, there was once a thriving export trade in kiacks from Nova Scotia to the New England states, to Boston in particular. Local fishermen packed thousands of barrels of salted gaspereaux or kiacks each year for shipment.

Kiack once throve abundantly in Nova Scotia’s Tusket River. Here’s praise by Michael McAdam in the Spring 1999 journal of The Atlantic Salmon Federation (Vol. 48 No. 1): “THE TUSKET has always been unique among Nova Scotia 's great rivers. She rises in the scrublands, bogs and old-growth forest bordering the southwestern extremity of the Tobeatic Wilderness Reserve. The two major branches, the East and West (aka Carleton River) branches, flow through a lengthy series of streams, each connected through chains of lakes.

The East Branch's Quinan River, fed by Big Gull, Quinan and Great Barren Lakes, picks up the dark, foam-flecked outflows of Rushy, Canoe and Keggeshook lakes and join Gillfillan Lake's long expanse to swell the Tusket's widening rush to the sea.

Part of the Tusket's aforementioned uniqueness is the fact that its riverine habitat is interspersed with large, relatively deep bodies of water which afford cool, oxygenated refuge to migratory fish such as the Atlantic Salmon and gaspereau (kiacks, alewives, gasparots) which arrive each spring.

The increasing acidity of her waters has stabilized at levels still lethal to alevins; the remnants of the once great runs of kiacks provide an annual harvest for only a few tenacious fishermen—but the exotic species thrive and increase their numbers each season.” 
                                                       —Michael McAdam, ASF Journal


Silly Origin of the Word Kiack 
Once Given in Oxford Dictionaries

Contrary to a previously printed OED etymology, there is no linguistic reason whatsoever to suppose that kiack is a variant of kayak, the Inuit boat. Ki’ak is the Mi’kmaq word for this fish. The kayak was never used where this fish is abundant.

Nor is there a relationship with a kyack, the American packsack that goes on either side of a packsaddle.

The word kiack does not appear in the first or the second edition of The Canadian Oxford Dictionary. I guess the way Nova Scotians talk is unimportant to the Toronto snobs who wrote that dictionary. However, the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary does have an entry for the word kiack. Unfortunately they have no knowledge of Mi’kmaq, and all they can do is offer the meek and hesitant “perhaps from” kayak. And then again, OED, perhaps not. Perhaps some knowledge of Canadian aboriginal languages and some letting go of British snottiness in the face of “foreign” languages might stand the world’s leading dictionary writers in better stead than lickspittle guesses based in wilful, racist ignorance?

By the way, the common spelling in Nova Scotia and indeed in Canada is kiack, not as the Oxford Dictionary suggests, kayak. Nowadays kayak as a spelling is almost never used, since it causes confusion with the Inuit water craft, the same confusion it caused in the not-very-inquisitive minds of OED lexicographers.

Lexicographic Update!
The Oxford English Dictionary has removed its suggested etymology of the word kayak as the source of kiack. Now it sniffishly whispers that “kayak” [sic] is “perhaps from Algonquian.” Eastern Algonquian is the large family to which the Mi'kmaq language belongs.

However the OED persists in putting the definition under the head word kayak, stubbornly presenting as common the least used by Canadians of kiack’s several spellings. It will not even list kiack, the spelling version that appears in most Canadian newspapers and Nova Scotia fishing guides and magazines. There is apparently no end to British disdain for exactly how we colonials spell our own words. You may know also that Oxford University Press has closed down its Canadian dictionary operations in Canada. There will be no third edition of the Oxford Canadian Dictionary any time soon.

And now, with today’s rantlet expressed, I shall swim away to peruse awhile my Mi’kmaq dictionary. Hint, hint, OED! 

                                    (c) copyright 2013 William Gordon Casselman

 
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Canada Primrose:Etymology of the common and botanical names of this harbinger of a late northern spring

Québec name: la primevère du lac Mistassini

Common names : Lake Mistassini primrose, Canadian primrose, Dwarf Canadian primrose, Bird's Eye primrose, Canada Cowslip, Oxlip

Genus: Primula < primula veris medieval Latin, literally ‘first little thing of spring’ < primus Latin, first + - ula Latin feminine diminutive ending, little + ver, veris Latin, spring.

Family: Primulaceae, the primrose family
Species: Of the more than 500 species in Primula, most are tender biennials and perennials grown as pot plants and put into Canadian gardens for the summer. But some will winter if protected. Hundreds of hybrids exist, but only one wild one will concern us here.

The Canadian primrose, Primula mistassinica Michx., is now rare in the Pacific and western areas of its range. Other names include Dwarf Canadian primrose, Lake Mistassini primrose, and Bird's Eye primrose. A hardy little primula that likes cool wet feet, it welcomes a May morning with a compact umbel of purply-pink flowers that have vivid yellow eyes. Preferred habitats include springy stream banks and dripping rock ledges that keep its soil moist.

The plant was discovered in the spring of 1786 in the eastern part of its range in northern Québec. The year before, Louis XVI, monarch of France, had fallen into a regal funk because his gardens at Versailles had begun to bore him. “One more clump of fleur-de-lys and I’ll eat my wig!” he may have pouted to France’s greatest botanist of the day, André Michaux, remembered in the last part of the flower’s botanical name, in the authority tag, as Michx. The king then shipped the obedient and delighted Michaux off to the new world to collect more inspiring specimens.

Michaux discovered and named hundreds of plants new to the botany of his day. He traveled widely in North America. One floral gem Michaux found beside Lake Mistassini, named by the local Montagnais for the great boulders that line its shore. Mista-assini means ‘big-rock water’ in Montagnais. Michaux called it a fairy primrose because it was smaller than French species he knew.

Historic fur trading rock at the head of the Rupert River on Lake Mistassini. Fur brigades supplying Mistassini from Rupert's House would leave tobacco offerings here when passing.

Lac mistassini is Quebec’s largest natural lake. Half the size of Lake Ontario, Mistassini Lake lies 700 kilometres north of Montreal near Chibougamau, surrounded by black spruce forests and fabled rivers. It’s a brook trout paradise. From Lake Mistassini most North American hatcheries get their initial brookie stock.

Word Lore

Primrose is an Englishing of primula. But the oldest word in our language for a species is cowslip which began in Anglo-Saxon or Old English as cu-slyppe ‘cow dung,’ such an unpleasant tag for so fetching an herb arising from the fact that these plants did well in a moist meadow near a plop of cow manure and Anglo-Saxons apparently thought the flower sprang from cow paddies! Slyppe is cognate with slipa Old Norse, slime, dung, shit, mud, and is related to slop.

Uses: Primrose flowers are made into a wine, used to perk up jams, and candied to decorate pastries. Young cowslip leaves add spice to salads and meat stuffings. Some people chop up the pungent root of Primula vulgaris (Latin, common) and add it to potpourri. Personally I would not use it for any of these purposes due to its allergen-laden leaflets.

Toxic Leaves of Primrose?
A popular belief of gardeners is that all primroses cause skin irritation if one touches the leaves. This is not true for everyone and not true for all primroses. Most have glandular hairs on the underside of the leaves. The heads of these hairs contain a quinone called primetin that will indeed irritate human skin but usually only in persons particularly prone to dermal allergies. The stamens of many species produce a mild contact dermatitis. Don’t touch the stamens and avoid vacuum-cleaner-like sniffings of the flowers.

Here’s a toxicology lab note on the active chemical:
5,8-dihydroxyflavone (primetin) the contact sensitizer of Primula mistassinica Michx.

“ 5,8-Dihydroxyflavone (primetin) has been shown to be the sensitizer in Primula mistassinica Michaux and probably the source of allergic contact dermatitis in four milkers. Its sensitizing properties as determined in guinea-pigs, are strong. As far as is known this is the first experimental demonstration of the sensitizing potency of a flavone. Presumably the flavone, with its uncommon 5,8-arrangement of hydroxy groups, is oxidized in the skin to the corresponding quinone (primetinquinone). Quinone was prepared from primetin and used for experimental sensitization of guinea-pigs. It also revealed strong sensitizing properties. Cross-reactions were obtained not only with the synthetic quinone in the flavone-sensitive animals but also with primetin in primetinquinone-sensitive guinea-pigs. Preliminary sensitization tests with other flavones have demonstrated that the whole group of flavonoid components should be taken into consideration as potential sensitizers.” authors of tox. abstract: Hausen BM, Schmalle HW, Marshall D, Thomson RH.



Biographical Note about Michaux

André Michaux was born in 1746 and died in 1802. After studying under Bernard de Jussieu, beginning in 1779, he began a series of explorations searching for and classifying new species of plants in England, France and the Pyrenees. Becoming French Consul in Persia led to full-time botanical explorations there (1782-85). Next, by order of the king of France, Louis XVI, Michaux travelled in North America to send back tree species suitable to transplant for naval shipbuilding. French shipbuilders wished to copy English masts and see if the superbly tall pines of North America, so excellent as masts, might grow in France. Before his departure from Paris, Thomas Jefferson provided Michaux him with letters of introduction as a scientist. In 1801, while exploring for plants in Madagascar his health failed from the exertion and he died of a tropical fever. Besides the hundreds of plants that bear his name, Michaux is remembered as the silviculturist who wrote the first book on the forest trees of America.

Quotations

Shakespeare enjoyed the sound of the word, as in Act 2 of Macbeth where the porter’s famous hell speech concludes, “I had thought to have let in some of all professions that go the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire.” In Hamlet, the chaste Ophelia advises her brother Laertes against “the primrose path of dalliance.” 

       © copyright 2013

 

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Wanigan: A Word Stuffed Full of Early Canadian Stories

WANIGAN

 

Wanigan: A Word Full of Canadian History

New Brunswick lumbermen used this storage box on a raft or a scow to transport to a new site personnel and camp supplies. Canoeists still use a wooden wanigan to carry various supplies.

In the old lumbering days of New Brunswick , the word was sometimes applied to the raft itself. The cook shack could be on the boat too with a floating mess hall, until facilities on shore were set up.

Whites borrowed the term into English from local Algonkian-speaking peoples.

In Ojibwa wa’nikka’n was a storage pit containing a cache of odds and ends that might be useful for trade.

Montagnais has atawangan ‘trade storage’ related to atawan ‘to trade,’ the same Algonkian root that named the Ottawa people, the trading band that gave its name to our capital city.

In the Abnaki language waniigan is a ‘pit trap’ or ‘a container for sundries.’

A variant of wanigan was wangan (no relationship to the computer game, that's a Japanese word). “Running the wangan” was taking a loaded boat downriver.

In Seven Rivers of Canada, Hugh MacLennan writes of lumbering on New Brunswick’s St. John River: “Within three weeks the Wangan boat men clear the river of stray logs all the way from Beechwood to Maugerville.”

A wangan or wanigan box was a large chest in which New Brunswick lumberjacks kept clothing, pipes, tobacco, and other camp necessities.

Out west, logging company stores were called wanigans where the logger could buy bush clothes and supplies.

During the gold rushes, wanigan was used to name a one-room shed on skids that was used as instant accommodation in boom towns. Up north, huts mounted on sleds with runners and towable by Bombardiers were called wanigans.

Another use of this all-purpose term can be found in a 1966 western edition of Eaton’s Fall & Winter Catalogue: “Natural sheepskin wannigans for wear under overboots.” This wannigan is a short-laced, leather-soled boot. Adaptable wear. Adaptable word.

* The picture at the very top of this entry is a new wanigan made by the West Coast Canoe Company (Handcrafted Cedar Canvas Canoes). Contact Larry Bowers, proprietor  1-800-446-1588 or local 250-287-7348.

Bill Casselman

Copyright © 2013 William G Casselman

 

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The Canadian Word CRUMMY is sourced

Bill Casselman's

Canadian Word of the Day

Riding in a Crummy

Crummy meaning ‘lousy, of poor quality’ derives from an extension in mid-nineteenth century American English of crumb ‘body louse.’

But here’s another, originally Canadian meaning of crummy. In British Columbian logging areas, from the late 1930s, a crummy was an old box car or caboose in which loggers were transported from towns to the current cutting site at the logging camp.

A bit later, beat-up buses and trucks used to haul forest labourers were crummies.

Now in British Columbia crummy can mean a school bus, or any vehicle that carries workers to and from distant work sites. This usage has spread southward into the states of Washington and Oregon too.

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End HAZING at university forever: Take Hazers' Names!

How to Stop Hazing Permanently

- - - Here’s a quick solution both for Ryerson University Engineering Students & for 

All Other Institutions of Higher Bullying

The solution to hazing among university students lies not with Ontario Premier Wynne performing her punitive schoolmarm rant, nor with the ineffectual president of Ryerson, an executive lame-o who’s going to meet with the engineering students for a cozy chat, an adult discussion of the wonderfulness parameters which they can mutually agree upon. Well, President Lame-O has held his meeting and guess what? The Neanderthal sadists got off scot-free. No penalty for hazing for our campus Torquemadas. No sirree, Bob. Them fellers is tops at Ryerson U! By the way, Ryerson's the only Canadian "university" where you can get a B.A. in Beaver Recognition or Old Testament Map Reading.

There is a powerful way to bring all university hazing among engineering students to a quick halt. 

Inform engineering firms who are going to hire all these Ryerson engineers in a couple of years and see if the louts who promote and carry out hazing are the kind of employees these construction companies and engineering firms desire.

Take pictures of any engineering sophomore who votes in favor of hazing or participates in that pseudo-Nazi brutalizing, keep his name, attach his hazing-mania to his student file, and, when he graduates, present his file to a company thinking about hiring him.

Make no mistake. These hazers are the same high-school football bullies who tripped the crippled boy in the hallway and then stepped on his hands, the same guffawing jocks who pushed the paraplegic girl in her wheelchair down the front steps of the school and then lurked at the top of the stairs giggling, like Richard Widmark in the 1947 film noir “Kiss of Death.”

Are such lunks the caliber of graduate engineer that modern companies wish to hire? Is that how to get a new bridge designed and built? Have some S&M engineer humiliate all the workers before bridge construction begins? Make those scum crawl through pig manure? Would you entrust a multimillion-dollar project to a Ryerson engineering grad who’s a psychotic bully?

And don’t forget to have psychological profiles done of these hazing thugs. There is a creepy, compensatory sexual element to a nineteen-year-old boy who gets a thrill out of degrading other boys, stripping them semi-naked and having them creep through muck. Hundreds of psych reports detail an average bully’s immense freight of sexual-inadequacy feelings. Many, many bullies have teeny wienies.

The opposite psych deficits occur too. The loud, honking dick-wagging of disturbed show-offs occurs among bullies. Are either of those sexual cripples the kind of engineers a company wants on board as employees. Let the big engineering firms answer that one.

All I know is: the first engineering school to implement record-keeping on hazers will see the torture end forever.

Bill Casselman