After tales came back from Mount Everest about a man-beast roaming the mountains, people were looking to read about the creature. The phrase “abominable snowman” was coined by Calcutta Statesman columnist Henry Newman in 1921. But how did the creature get to be known as the abominable snowman? Let’s find out…
Lieutenant Colonel Charles Howard-Bury led a reconnaissance expedition into Mount Everest. The group stumbled upon some tracks that Howard-Bury thought the tracks may have been created by a loping gray wolf. His sherpa guides said that it came from a “metoh-kangmi”. Metoh would translate to “man-bear” and “Kang-mi” would translate to the snowman.
Confusion about the name probably came about after a telegraphist miscoded the “metoh-kangmi” to “metch-kangmi”, where Newman claimed that “Metch-kangmi translated to “abominable snowman”. However, we can see that the translation is supposed to be closer to “man-bear snowman, as the word “metch” did not occur in the Sherpa language.
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