Repeat #740 Isle of Thule

One of the dangers of having a ferret-like mind like mine is sometimes you go chasing down some weird rabbit holes. Sometimes all the way to the tullies.
I suspect you know what I mean when I say “way out in the tullies.” It’s an expression we all learn early and it means pretty much the same as “way out in the sticks.” In fact, I always assumed tullies were sticks, or possibly some reed-like things that grew in marshes. Cattails in the swamp, or something like that.
The phrase “out in the tullies” always conjured up notions of desolation and the kind of landscape where you were likely to get bit by something poisonous while you died of thirst being swallowed by quicksand as swamp leeches drank your blood.
So one day while I was writing the word tullies I noticed that it redlined in my spellchecker. I looked it up in the online dictionaries and it wasn’t there. Not in the online etymology dictionary either. I finally Googled the word and an entry from wiki-answers came up asking people desperately if they knew the origin of the word.
So the matter rested until the other day when I read about a book based on the phrase Ultima Thule. For the first time I made the connection that thule was spelled the same as those pods outdoor types strap on top of their cars that hold skis and gear and what not.
The name of one of the podmakers is spelled the same as the last word it Ultima Thule, except it’s pronounced tool-ie. So I looked up Ultima Thule. One of the pronunciations is Ultima thoo-lie but one of the pronunciations is Ultima tool-ie.
Aha, I thinks, with one of those Koestler-ian eureka moments. I have discovered the origin of the tullies. Folk idiom has preserved Latin origins. Because the term Ultima Thule means “the ends of the earth.” Medieval geographers put in on their colorful maps next to the wind-blowing gargoyles and fearsome creatures of the unknown.
And used the term to refer to any place beyond the borders of the known world.
Sounds like the tullies to me.
Watch out for seamonsters in the rabbit holes.
America, ya gotta love it.