Koekoe is the Marquesan word for entrails. It means also intelligence, character, and conscience. A man of good heart is in Marquesan a man of good bowels. The good fathers were sore put to it to write their invocation to the “bleeding heart of the Savior,” and one finds a warning in Bishop Dordillon’s dictionary:
Les Canaques mettent dans les entrailles (koekoe) les sentiments que nous mettons dans le cœur (houpo).
Quelquefois il convient de traduire ad sensum pluto que ad verbum et vice versa; Le cœur de Jesus—te houpo a Ietu.
Extreme unction, the sacrament, is eteremaotio, pronounced, “aytairaymahoteeo.”
The daily usage of common English words fixed certain ideas in the minds of the islanders for all time.
Oli mani, a corruption of old man, is used for anything old; hence a blunt, broken knife or a ragged pair of trousers is oli mani.
A clergyman is mitinané, pronounced mitt-in-ahny, an effort at missionary. In Tahiti the word is mitinare or mikonare, and is one of ribald humor. It is also a bitter epithet against one who is sanctimonious. The white traders, beachcombers, and officials have given the word this significance by their ridicule of religion and its professors.
What more picturesque record of the introduction of cattle into Samoa than bullamacow? It is the generic name in those islands for beef, canned beef, and virtually all kinds of canned meats. A child could trace it to the male and female bovine ruminants first put ashore there, and nominated by the whites “bull and a cow.”
The good Bishop Dordillon notes that a cook is enata tunu kai, but that the common word is kuki, and for kitchen fae kuki. That kuki is our own cook, as the Marquesans heard the sailors call him—cooky. Fae is house.
A pipe is paifa (pyfa), and tobacco paké (pahkay), rough pronunciations of the English words.