Skwerl
February 19, 2004, 10:15pm
1
Why is this creature called “abominable” so frequently? Not the really bad snowman, or even horrible? Abominable is far from a commonly used word. I figure one of the first English explorers wrote it that way in his journal once, and it’s been used ever since, is that why?
According to a website called “Cryptozoology A to Z,” it started thanks to a misinterpretation of the original Sherpa word. And I quote:
*The more proper name is Yeti, but most Westerners have been more familiar with the moniker “Abominable Snowman.” “Abominable Snowman” is a phrase coined, accidentally, by a Calcutta Statesman newspaper columnist, Henry Newman, in 1921.
It happened when Newman wrote about the 1921 sighting by Lieutenant Colonel (later Sir) C.K. Howard-Bury and his party, who saw dark forms moving about on a twenty-thousand-foot-high snowfield above their location, the Lhapka-La pass on the Tibetan side of the Himalayan mountains, and viewed them through binoculars. This is the first credible Western sighting of what until then had been mostly a shadowy tale (at least to Westerners) of strange, hairy upright creatures in Tibet, Bhutan, Sikkim, Mustang, and Nepal. Howard-Bury would later, on September 22, 1921, find footprints “three times those of normal humans” at the site where the dark forms were moving about.
The Sherpas insisted that the prints were those of the metoh-kangmi, as Howard-Bury rendered it. Kang-mi loosely means “snow creature.” The metoh part should have been written as met-teh, which translates as “man-sized wild creature.”
Newman’s mistake was caused in part by Howard-Bury’s mistransliteration of the Sherpa word. Howard-Bury did not understand that the Sherpas recognized several types of creatures; on this occasion they had used a generic, not a specific, term. The error was compounded when Newman changed Howard-Bury’s metoh-kangmi to metch kangmi, which he explained as a Tibetan word meaning “Abominable Snowman.” *
So it appears he’s not really abominable, just misunderstood.
Cite
