Word: muckamucks
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Borrowing & Inventing. Hundreds of Americanisms, Mathews found, grew out of other languages. English-speaking settlers in the Spanish Southwest turned estampida into stampede, vamos into vamoose, and calabozo into calaboose. Alaskan settlers corrupted a powerful drink of the Hutsnuwu Indians into hooch, changed hiu muckamuck, the Chinook words meaning "plenty to eat," into a high-muck-a-muck, a "person of importance." From the German gunsmiths of Pennsylvania came rifle, probably out of riffel, the word for groove. The Dutch produced koekje (cookies); and their word for dung-pappekak-eventually turned into poppycock...
...participating, and introduced himself to me; after a little conversation the extremely polite gentleman invited me to call on him at nine the following morning, saying he would like to have me meet His Honor the Judge and a few friends. The Judge, the Great Mogul, the High Muckamuck, was quite enough; he must have been a foreigner, for with frigid smile and withering glance he said: "Ignorantia non excuset; four dollars and nine cents, please." I told him I never spoke the language in my life, but supposed it was all right, paid him for his exertions, and hoped...
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