Now names have stories. For the last 55 years I have wanted to 
learn the story of the name "Shinnery", but in all the Dictionaries
and 
Encyclopedias which I have searched in that time I have never found the 
name. Even Bailey's cyclopedia does not carry it. It was only when I 
tried to find the origin of the family name "Chinnery", that I
came 
upon that story. For the name of that family comes from the Norman French

word "thene" meaning an oak tree, and "Cheniere" meant
an oaK grove. So, 
as the French "oh" is pronounced muchlike the English "sh",
here you come 
to our words "shin" and "shinnery". 
 
     It is rather remarkable that our name "shin-oak" should carry
a 
duplication of meaning, Just as our name Rio Grande River drops into 
the same peculiarity. Both cases are the results of a transfer to our 
language of words from a foreign tongue, and the family name in the old 
language becomes the "given" or "first" in the new. We
have a common 
phrase-very common during the Civil War-referring to a class of fighting

as "guerilla warfare". Now the word "Guerilla" taken
from the Spanish 
means in that language "a little war", so here again we have a
double 
us of the same word, another case of "tautology". And to these
examples 
there-may be added the name "Cork Oak", because it is highly probable

that "Cork" comes to us by an intermediate language from the Roman

".uercus", given to the cork bearing oak of the Mediterranean Shores.

 
     But assuming that shinnery is really derived from a French word 
there is still a missing link. How did the name come down into English 
from a French source? When the Norman French word came into England it 
is reasonable to account for it as coming in with William the Conqueror,

and his Norman French vassals. To parallel this, we can only say that 
the French, first under LaSalle, and later under their Western exploraO 
tions, claimed, from Louisiana to the Rocky Mountains; and the Western 
country, including the head waters of the Red River of the South, was 
the home of French traders and trappers, for fifty years before, and for

as many after, the purchase of Louisiana from Franch. So such a name 
might easily pass from the French tongue to our English border people. 
To support this surmise, there is a town named Cheniere in Acadian 
Louisiana, and 100 years ago the French f1rm of traders ahd trappers, 
headed by the Chouteaus of St. Louis, Mo., had a traders station on the 
head of the Osage River in Southwestern Missouri, which bore the name 
LaCheniere (the Oak Grove). Thus the name of our diminutive oak passed 
from the traders and trappers to our unlearned frontiersman of America 
nationality, but being local to those frontiersmen, it did not get to 
the men in armed chairs, who make Dictionaries. 
 
     In relating this episode of history I have a special word for you. 
 
     You are now taking studies, preliminary to your entrance into the 
worl4 of action, and we call this your education. As a matter of fact 
your education continues through life. This preliminary state is de- 
voted to preparing you for the later stages, and may be taken as having 
three main purposes: 1st, to teach you how to acquire habits of careful 
observation; 2nd, to give you something of the observations made by our 
forerunners during the centuries of recorded knowledge; and 3rd, to train

you in drawing correct conclusions from the facts of your own observation

and those of others. Now of these purposes, you probably get in your 
school more attention to the 2nd item than to the others. 
 
 
2.