CRS Strikes again:

I guess that's what I get for trying to remember what's in the first post after reading the 60 between that and my Reply box.

I think the old Erie Canal Sal was mentioned somewhere in the thread - or maybe in another one I looked at recently, and it just stuck.
I guess I should have said "the most common reference is to ..."?
I'm working on the theory that many(?) words that start with "sk" come from German or Dutch (Deutsch?), and the prevalent use of the term in my area, where there are many old-timers of that extraction, could have kept the term in common use later into "modern" times. Now if I can just find a really old dictionary....

It is an interesting question, and while we have a number of examples of usage, we don't seem to have come up with much about origins that seems very believable to me.

John