I meandered into the reviews for this book, "Glory Days of Logging/Action in the Big Woods, British Columbia to California" after Amazon caught me browsing through "Minnesota Logging Railroads." (Isn't it wonderful how Amazon does this? I recall disparaging them in the late 1990s when the stock market had given this profitless company a valuation exceeding General Motors - proof that the market does really know stuff about the future!) The author of the review has some pretty strong opinions about lumberjack versus logger:
(Please don't call them lumber-jacks. I never heard a man who works in the woods called a lumber-jack all my years going up in Oregon. Yet a recent TV show about the worlds most dangerous jobs constantly referred to them a lumber-jacks.)I grew up in Oregon hearing both terms used. Of course, half of my family was from Minnesota. So, I thought, perhaps it is a regionalism. After all, shortly after I had moved from Oregon to Minnesota, I was having dinner at my future wife's house and my future mother-in-law said, "could you pass the hot dish, Tom?" I was at a loss for what to do - hell, most of the dishes on the table were hot! How was I to know that "hot dish" is Minnesotan for casserole?
So perhaps lumberjack is Minnesotan for logger? Wikipedia suggests that it is more a function of time than place. But our true Minnesota Lumberjacks are timeless:
And don't miss the Lumberjack World Championships in the Lumberjack Bowl when you visit Hayward, Wisconsin.
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