Buttocks
The Meaning of the Word: We assume that this word has the same meaning in Coos Bay Milluk as it has in the Milluk texts, where it is translated as ‘anus’. Swadesh was evidently embarrassed enough when asking for this word, using the euphemism of ‘your seat’, and not even getting Lolly to repeat it, so that he did not ask anything more about the word’s meaning.
Instant Phonetic Englishization: moo_yoos.
The Hanis Word: In his slip-file dictionary, Jacobs indicates that this word is both a Hanis and a Milluk word.
Vowel Length in the Word: In the Milluk texts, Jacobs phonetically transcribed the vowel in the second syllable of this word as being a long vowel in just one of the six times in the Milluk texts that this word occurs. In our table of transcriptions, we write it as being a long vowel as a transcription of the word as it occurs in Jacobs’ work with Mrs. Peterson because of the fact that Jacobs wrote it as a long vowel in his slip-file dictionary. That was when he had a chance to consider all of the six or more times that he had transcribed this word in his work with Mrs. Peterson. Moreover, that is the pronunciation that we hear from Lolly Metcalf. We also notice that twice in the Milluk texts the word is written with the vowel of the last syllable being a stressed vowel. We take that indication of stress in two tokens of the word as a clue that Jacobs was hearing this vowel as the same longish vowel that he heard when he wrote the instance of the word in the Milluk texts where he actually indicated that the vowel in the second syllable was long. Stress and vowel length are two different things, but stressed vowels tend to be not only louder than unstressed vowels, but also a bit longer than unstressed vowels.