My daughter came across this anecdote while reading “Lost in the Arctic” by Lawrence Millman (National Geographic adventure, September 2002; reprinted in “The Best American Travel Writing 2003”, ed. Ian Frazier [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003]):
“Sometimes Qunjujuq [the author’s Inuit guide] would bring along his father, a barrel-chested elder whose face resembled the contour lies on a topo map. Like a number of other people I’d met in Sanirajal, the old man, Suvulliq, knew only one expression in English: ‘You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!’ Some years ago, the town’s Hudson’s Bay Company trader would perform the occasional interment and, instead of reciting a proper burial service, would solemnly intone Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Gunga Din’. The poem’s famous line had entered the local vernacular as a sort of vaguely reverential sentiment, although no one had the slightest idea what it meant.” [Frazier, page 219]
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