What’s in a name? WA wants to officially be ‘The Evergreen State’

In Washington, the nickname “The Evergreen State” winks at you across Washington from road signs, license plates, even quarters. It’s a popular sobriquet, but it’s never been made an official nickname. We’ve been conducting a casual relationship with it for more than a century.

That could soon change. Sen. Jeff Wilson, R-Longview, wants to make the arrangement formal with Senate Bill 5000. “What’s in a name?” said Wilson. “For 132 years, we’ve called ourselves the Evergreen State … It’s on our welcome signs — leave and come back and there it is.” Washington became the 42nd state on November 11, 1889, the only one named after a U.S. president. The unofficial state nickname was coined a few months later by C.T. Conover, a Seattle Post-Intelligencer editor and realtor, to celebrate the state’s vast evergreen forests. The nickname appeared in Governor John H. McGraw’s 1893 inaugural address. In 2007 it made its way onto the Washington state quarter. But Washington is one of a handful of states in which the legislature hasn’t adopted an official nickname. Washington has enjoyed other monikers. When it transitioned from territory to state, many were calling it the “Chinook State.” Residents used both nicknames during the opening decades of the 20th century. In The American Language, H.L. Mencken reported that “Chinook State” was the more popular choice at the time. The term “Chinook” refers to several groups of Native peoples who spoke Chinookan languages and traditionally lived throughout Washington and Oregon. “At the time, the name ‘Chinook State’ made sense. Chinook is one of the most recognizably Washingtonian words,” said David Robertson, a linguist who runs a website dedicated to Chinook Jargon. From its early days, Chinook Jargon served not only as a trade language but also as a “family language” in Washington, particularly around Fort Vancouver during the fur trade era. The families at that time often consisted of Indigenous women and fur traders, usually French-speaking men from eastern Canada. “These folks had only recently encountered each other as cultures, and the only language they could share in common was Chinook Jargon,” Robertson said. “They spoke it with each other, and their children grew up with it as their first language.” As settlers moved across the Columbia River from Oregon into Washington around 1855, they brought their knowledge of Chinook Jargon. They quickly realized they could use it to communicate with local Native peoples, gaining information about resources like water sources or where to find food and hunt. “Virtually everybody in the state knew enough to carry on a basic conversation in Chinook Jargon, and that was likely the case up until statehood,” Robertson said. In fact, the state’s unofficial motto, “Al-ki,” is a phrase in Chinook Jargon meaning “by and by.” There is no current effort to make it official, even though most other state legislatures have also designated an official motto. Wilson’s bill to make “The Evergreen State” official is still being considered by his colleagues in the Senate.

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