Distinctly Montana Magazine

D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A • W I N T E R 2 0 1 9 78 Barred Owl DONNIE SEXTON W I L D W E S T W OR DS with CHRYSTI THE WORDSMITH D E PA R T M E N T H E R I TA G E W I L D W E S T W OR DS S T O K E D , D U D E ! Facinating facts about owls www.distinctlymontana.com/words191 DISTINCTLY MONTANA | DIGITAL T HE ADJECTIVE STOKED, MEANING "EXCITED," HAS PLAYED A SERVICEABLE ROLE IN AMERICAN YOUTH SLANG FOR AT LEAST FOUR DECADES NOW. Pacific Ocean surfers put this word to imaginative use in the 1960s to express delirious enthusiasm for their sport. American linguist Ben Zimmer traced the word's printed debut to a 1963 Hawaii magazine called Paradise of the Pacific which offered an article en- titled, "e Oceanlands are Stoked Over Wet Rock-and-Roll. Cowabunga!" is spirited usage is thoroughly American, but its parent is the Dutch verb stoken meaning "to stir and feed a fire." In the 1600s, it came to English as stoke. Anyone who has tended a fireplace or woodstove has stoked the fire. In the mid-1800s, the word took on a new meaning: to stuff food into the mouth as if shoveling wood into a furnace. A quotation from an 1894 London periodical reads, "He…'stokes' his meal, till the veins in his forehead swell." en in the 1960s, California athletes put a surfer's spin on the term, figuratively stoking themselves with the thrill and fire of their sport. Over the decades, skateboarders and skiers from Marin to Montana to Massachussetts have appropriated stoked, helping the word find its way into the mainstream of American slang. T HERE'S AN IDEA ABOUT HUMAN LANGUAGE ORIGIN CALLED THE BOW-WOW THEORY. It posits that human be- ings acquired language by imitating the animals in their world. ough there's no way to prove this notion, it nevertheless compels us to con- sider animal onomatopoeias. In English, we have bow-wow, oink, meow, whinny or neigh. e same animals in Japan say wan-wan, buh-buh, nyaw-nyaw, and hihiin. is imitative impulse is taken a step further when we name species after their sounds. e cuckoo, bobwhite, and whippoorwill are birds that say their own names. So do our Montana residents the killdeer, chickadee, and curlew. And while these birds sleep through the darkness, the many owls of the land are proclaiming their common name. Owl derives from ule, an Old English imitation of the bird's cry. e German term for the bird is Eula; the French say hibou, and in the Hindi language it's ulloo. e great horned owl, whose deep hoots pierce Montana winter nights, is common throughout the Americas. Its scientific classification is Bubo virginianus, a name formalized in 1788. Many owls around the world belong to the genus Bubo, most likely a Latin-based imitation of their call. e species name virginianus, not imitative at all, refers to the commonwealth of Virginia, established in 1776, whose name was once emblematic of all things native to the New World. O W L STEVE AKRE

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