Years back a friend who hailed from the mountains of West Virginia talked about his two maiden aunts as the burlap sisters.
“A couple old bags,” he said with a smile. To make it an even better story, he added that their last name was Gunny. “Mable and Margaret Gunny.”
I don’t know if any of that was true. My friend was from West Virginia, after all, and those mountain folk do love a good story.
Still, burlap bags used to be called gunny sacks. The name came from “goni,” an Indian word from the Mangalore district in India. It simply meant fiber. The English morphed it into “gunny,” a word they gave jute bags used to transport grain.
Out in Idaho where most of the potatoes in the country come from, gunny sacks became a standard measure for 100 pounds of spuds. Even though the potato farmers no longer use gunny sacks for their produce, they still refer to 100 lbs of potatoes as a sack.
In the part of Missouri where I grew up, everybody had a supply of gunny sacks. You could use them for anything: garden vegetables, apples, hickory nuts and even chickens. For some reason, though, they didn’t call them gunny sacks, they called them pokes.
A peek into local history offered a feasible reason for this. The area was settled back in the late 1700s by French fur traders. Poke comes from the French word poque, which means sack.
Having said that, my Hoosier grandfather was fond of cautioning us to never buy “a pig in a poke.” Maybe a couple of those Missouri fur traders made it up the White River to Wildcat Creek after all.
Supposedly, the pig in a poke warning came from parts of Europe where meat was scarce but cats were not. Before buying a pig, it was good idea to open the poke.
And sometimes that let the cat out of the bag.
