When distinct linguistic communities come into sustained contact, a new language will sometimes emerge, called a pidgin. In the eighteenth century, for example, European colonialism in China resulted in a pidgin that incorporated elements from English, Portuguese, and several Asian languages. The motivation for creating such languages is often mercantile: you can’t exploit someone if he can’t understand you. The word pidgin itself reflects these mercantile concerns: the term probably arose as a Chinese pronunciation of the word business. In North America, numerous pidgins arose in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including one now known as Chinook Jargon, made up of the European languages of English and French, and the Native American languages of Chinook, Nootka, and Salish. One of the words in Chinook Jargon was muck-a-muck, meaning food, as is evident in Henry Somerset’s 1895 travelogue The Land of the Muskeg: “The Chinooks waxed eloquent upon the food we should get at McLeod. ‘Yes/ they would say, ‘all kinds of muck-a-muck at McLeod; jam, cake, biscuits… plenty plenty muck-a-muck.’” This term was sometimes combined with another word from Chinook Jargon, hayo, to form the phrase hayo muck-a-muck, meaning plentiful food. The first part of the phrase was then misconstrued by English speakers as high, as in high muck-a-muck, which probably helped the term develop a new idiomatic sense: namely, a bigwig, a fat cat, a mogul, a VIP, the kind of high-and-mighty person who would have access to plenty of food. Later on, high muck-a-muck was further corrupted to high muckety-muck, perhaps on the analogy of phrases such as yakkety-yak, bumpity-bump, and lickety-split.