Cumshaw Artists

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Dean calling from Lake Bay, Washington.

Hiya, Dean.

Hello, Dean.

Hi.

Are you on a lake, then?

Or a bay?

No, that’s just, actually, we’re on Puget Sound.

Oh, okay.

All right.

I’m not quite sure how they got that name.

Okay.

All right.

Well, what’s up?

Well, I served in Vietnam, and I was assigned to a unit, and my job was, I was a comm shah

Artist, and I procured excess psychological material.

Basically, I appropriated things that weren’t tied down.

For example, if we had refrigerators in the Mekong Delta, but we didn’t have the regulators,

The regulators were up in Da Nang, I would go up to Da Nang and bring down the regulators.

You were reappropriating military material, or you were taking it from the locals?

No, no, no.

No, we were, since I was in the Navy, we were getting it mostly from the Army.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Always good to pick on the other services.

So you were borrowing it, is that right, permanently?

That’s right, with the intent not to return.

I see.

Taking it from Uncle Sam’s left pocket and putting it in his right pocket.

That is right, sir.

So you must have been pretty popular in the unit, right?

If you needed something, you came to see me.

I see.

Yeah, you know, I’ve seen this character in the movies.

It’s kind of a stock character, but I never realized that those were kind of, every unit probably had one or every group of any real size, right?

Yes.

And so your question then is, what in the heck is a Kamsha artist, right?

Yes, sir.

Yeah.

All right.

Here’s the thing.

We actually know, I think, with almost near certainty, where this word comes from.

Oh, how fast.

And it’s usually spelled in English, C-U-M-S-H-A-W, Kamsha.

And this is, you said you were in the Navy?

Yes, sir.

Yes, and it is well known in the Navy, but it has existed in other services.

And the history of this word goes back, oh, I don’t know how far, to at least the 1920s in this particular form,

To refer to somebody in the military who is kind of a fixer slash thief, if we can just lay the word out there,

Somebody who goes and kind of defeats the bureaucracy of the military to get things done

So that a unit or a division or a company can operate at like a reasonable level.

You know, they get the gasoline for the jeeps that have empty tanks, right?

They find the tires when tires are needed, and they bring the whiskey when a party is called for, right?

Yes.

All of the dictionaries that you’ll check will tell you that it probably comes from the Xiamen,

A Moi dialect of Chinese, which is from the Fujian province. And it’s transliterated into

Roman characters as Kamsia, K-A-M-S-I-A, with a long A. And it roughly means grateful thanks in

That language. And for a long time, as far back as the 1800s, when the Brits were in that part of

The world, they would often encounter beggars or supplicants or mendicants of some sort who would

Ask for things and they would constantly just say this phrase over and over, camsia, camsia,

And it was a way of asking for money. You know, just say it and then you give them money and they

Go away. But by association with the beggars, it came to mean a present, a bribe, or a gift.

And you will find this word kumshal then, which is the kind of corruption of it, you’ll find this

Word kumshal used in manifests for shipping, where they talk about the port duties that they paid

And they used this word.

They used the word kumshaw.

So it had a kind of quasi-official status

As a word to refer to the money

That you just had to pay to the guy

So that you could get your ship to the dock

And that you could count on your goods not being stolen

Or held up in customs, you know?

So, Dean, did you ever use it as a verb,

Like I need to kumshaw a truck?

Do you have any?

No, we would just go out and steal it.

Well, I ask because I’m looking at the historical dictionary of American slang that has some examples of it used as a verb as well.

But yeah, it goes back to this Chinese phrase apparently.

Yeah, the short version of long story is that the grifters and the thieves who might get money from you in that way by pretending that there was a duty paid when really it was just a bribe would also use the camsha phrase.

And so it came to mean anything obtained by chance or by wiles or at no cost or, to quote the historical dictionary of American slang, means that are devious, ingenious, or unofficial.

All of which you did, Dean.

Wow. Well, thank you so very much.

Yeah, so it’s a Chinese expression that goes back quite a ways.

Wow. I’ve always wondered, and now I know.

Well, folks, thank you. I love your show, by the way. It’s awesome.

Well, that’s very nice to hear. Thanks so much for calling, Dean. We’re glad to be of help.

Thank you.

Thanks, Dean. Bye-bye.

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