blow, while the New Zealanders more simply called it a pu. So the Amaxosa of South Africa call it umpu, from the imitative sound pu! The Chinook Jargon of North-West America uses the phrase mamook poo (make poo) for a verb 'to shoot,' and a six-chambered revolver is called tohum poo, i.e., a 'six-poo.' When a European uses the word puff to denote the discharge of a gun, he is merely referring to the smoke blown out, as he would speak of a puff of wind, or even a powder-puff or a puff-ball; and when a pistol is called in colloquial German a puffer, the meaning of the word matches that used for it in French Argot, a 'soufflant.' It has often been supposed that the puff imitates the actual sound, the bang of the gun, and this has been brought forward to show by what extremely different words one and the same sound may be imitated, but this is a mistake.[1] These derivations of the name of the gun from the notion of blowing correspond with those which give names to the comparatively noiseless blow-tube of the bird-hunter, called by the Indians of Yucatan a pub, in South America by the Chiquitos a pucuna, by the Cocamas a puna. Looking into vocabularies of languages which have such verbs 'to blow,' it is usual to find with them other words apparently related to them, and expressing more or less distant ideas. Thus Australian poo-yu, puyu 'smoke;' Quichua puhucuni 'to light a fire,' punquini 'to swell,' puyu, puhuyu 'a cloud;' Maori puku 'to pant,' puka 'to swell;' Tupi púpú, pupúre 'to boil;' Galla bube 'wind,' bubiza 'to cool by blowing;' Kanuri (root fu) fungin 'to blow, swell,' furúdu 'a stuffed pad or bolster,' &c., bubute 'bellows' (bubute fungin 'I blow the bellows'); Zulu (dropping the prefixes) puku, pukupu 'frothing, foam,' whence pukupuku 'an empty frothy fellow,' pupuma 'to bubble, boil,' fu 'a cloud,' fumfu 'blown about like high grass in the wind,' whence fumfuta 'to be confused, thrown into disorder,' futo 'bellows,' fuba 'the breast, chest,' then figuratively 'bosom, conscience.'
- ↑ See Wedgwood, 'Dic.' Introd. p. viii.
