highmuckamuck

high muckamuck also high muckety-muck n. Slang

An important, often overbearing person.

  [From Chinook Jargon hayo makamak, plenty to eat.]  

Word History: One might not immediately associate the word high muckamuck with fur traders and Native Americans, but it seems that English borrowed the term from Chinook Jargon, a pidgin language combining words from English, French, Nootka, Chinook, and the Salishan languages that was formerly used by them in the Pacific Northwest. In this language hayo makamak meant “plenty to eat” and is recorded in that sense in English contexts, the first one dated 1853, in which the phrase is spelled Hiou Muckamuck. In 1856 we find the first recorded instance of the word meaning “pompous person, person of importance,” in the Democratic State Journal published in Sacramento: “The professors—the high ‘Muck-a-Mucks’—tried fusion, and produced confusion.”

* * *