The earliest settlers of Australia, when encountering the boomerang for the first time, engaged in “loanshifting” by calling it a “wooden sword”:
It is a myth that it
was Captain James Cook who recorded the name ‘boomerang’ for the first time. In
fact, there is no record that he ever used the term or even saw a returning
boomerang being thrown, though he did take one back to England, thinking it was
a primitive wooden sword. When he arrived in Botany Bay in 1770, he recorded that
the Aborigines were ‘all arm’d with darts and wooden swords’. His botanist, Sir
Joseph Banks, also likened the devices to ‘Arabian scymetars’ when he saw them
in their hands and fibre belts, as William Dampier had done when he saw them on
the west coast of Australia in 1688. All of these early explorers thought that
boomerangs were swords and none of them ever saw a boomerang being thrown, nor
did any of them ever record the term boomerang.
Indeed, boomerangs
continued to be referred to as ‘wooden swords’ for a couple of years after
settlement, in the journals of Governor Arthur Phillip (1789), Captain Watkin
Tench (1789) and surgeon John White (1790). (What
is a Boomerang)
The use of the
wooden-sword appears to be very partial, and confined, according to Mr.
Oldenfield, to the eastern natives § Dampier, indeed, says that the natives of
the mainland visited by him had the wooden-sword (i, p. 467), but he may have
mistaken the boomerang for this weapon. (Journal of Anthropology [1870] Issue
1, xviii)
[The] boomerang,
which the settlers often took for a wooden sword. (Samuel Sidney, The Land of
the Kangaroo and the Boomerang [Hurst & Company, 1899], 37)
