I’m going to tell you not about the first citation for hunch —that was in 1904, but instead, about the second from 1907. This is for hunch meaning suspicion or expectation. That second citation was from a poet named Robert Service. I don’t know if you’ve heard of him but he was very famous 100 years ago and he’s still well known here in Canada, with our northern sensibilities. He got famous writing poems about the Yukon gold rush. His use of the word hunch came in a poem called The Shooting of Dan McGrew . The scene is a frontier bar room. In the back, playing cards is Dangerous Dan McGrew. In stumbles a stranger and orders drinks for the house, then… His eyes went rubbering round the room, and he seemed in a kind of daze, Till at last that old piano fell in the way of his wandering gaze. The rag-time kid was having a drink; there was no one else on the stool, So the stranger stumbles across the room, and flops down there like a fool. In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway; Then he clutched the keys with his talon hands – my God! but that man could play. Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear, And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could HEAR; With only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold, A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold; While high overhead, green, yellow and red, the North Lights swept in bars? – Then you’ve a haunch what the music meant . . . hunger and night and the stars. It seems that Robert Service only had a hunch what the music meant himself since he was a bank clerk not a gold miner. But he was right about people being “clean mad for the muck called gold.” The way that people found gold during the Yukon gold rush was quite mad. The gold nuggets had often been deposited in river beds that had stopped being rivers many thousands of years ago. These river beds were buried under ten, twenty, thirty feet of peat that in turn was saturated with water and frozen hard as granite as permafrost. For many gold miners staking a claim meant building a big fire to melt some permafrost, mucking out the wet peat once it melted then repeating the process as you slowly burrowed down to the ancient river bed. Once there, you might find gold or you might not. Actually if your calculations were wrong you might not even find an ancient riverbed. This is why the stranger’s buckskin shirt was glazed with dirt. But none of this tells you anything about the etymology of hunch and I’ve got a hunch you were wondering about that. Actually the word hunch goes back much further than the beginning of the 20th century to 1581. The earliest meanings had a sense of “push” to them. A hunch-back may be thought of as a back that is pushed up out of shape. When you hunch your shoulders you push them up. By the mid 1800s a hunch could be a “tip” or a hint” that someone gave you, sort of pushing you toward the right answer. From being a “tip” or “hint” it isn’t too far a conceptual leap for a hunch to become an expectation Less