Word: muckamucks
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
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