Help with the Skeet
When did you first hear the word?
When I used the word “skeet” this week, I immediately got smacked with another idea to dig into.
This is not a word I had heard before this century yet lots of people say it is a well-known and widely used word in Newfoundland and Labrador English.
I am digging into this on my own and there’ll be a column on it in the future. But in the meantime, and especially who grew up in Newfoundland and Labrador, you can help out with your own experience:
What does the word skeet mean?
When did you first hear about it?
What year were you born?
Where were you born in Newfoundland and Labrador?
Send me an email at ed_hollett@hotmail.com or just reply to the email you got from Substack with this column in it. I won’t identify you publicly but I want to see if I can find something that I personally may have missed.
We’ll be back on Monday hard at ‘er as usual but for now just enjoy this bit of local humour and creativity.
My wife and I are from Bishop's Cove, Conception Bay North, and next to Upper Island Cove (where they used a lot of old words),,,,, UIC, some know, being the home town of John Lundrigan, the MP who goaded Pierre Trudeau to say "fuddle duddle", in the House of Commons, of which Ray Guy wrote a piece.
My wife says skeet to her is a derogatory word, as someone saying "that little skeet" and seems to have the meaning of "a little rascal". She taught children in school for a few years, but never heard it used then, in the 1960s, early 70s. But says maybe her grandfather may have used the word occasionally.
I seem a little familiar with it, in the sense of someone who is considered "underhanded" in their character. But neither of us ever used the word, and I can't think of anyone specific having used it.
However, I still routinely use the word "tumbler" for a drinking glass. How long ago did drinking glasses get flat instead of round bottoms, that tumbled over?
Sadly, the newer generation have lost the use of many old words. I have "tapped" my own shoes when about are 10 or 12 to age 15, (the late 1950s, early 1960s), and most now 10 years younger than me, from the same area, don't know what "tapping shoes" means.
I guess many young ones don't know what a "land line" telephone is.. I guess words are connected with a certain lifestyle, which has changed so much, especially shortly after confederation with Canada. A few years ago I told my grand daughter that my grandfather (John Adams, fisherman of UIC, was a "swiler" She had no idea what it meant, and when I explained it, she found it very discomforting. Yet it was a matter of survival in his day (1847 to 1920). The ministers and priests would bless the sealing fleets.
He couldn't write his name, just his X on a few documents, and only one photograph of him. .