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Post by Deleted on Mar 30, 2009 11:46:47 GMT
Back in the frontier days, expressions and vocabulary were invented as the settlers pushed West, and there weren't many people to try to keep the language on its original British rails. This is an excellent glossary of Western lingo and it really makes me wonder how much I could understand if I got dumped back in time 150 years or so. |
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LouisXIV
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L'estat c'est moi.
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Post by LouisXIV on Mar 30, 2009 16:48:47 GMT
kerouac2: Many of these terms are still used and not just in the west.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 30, 2009 17:08:45 GMT
Well, of course I understand a lot of them like "above board" for example, but when I see things like this, I would really be scratching my head:
Man for Breakfast - A murdered body in the streets at dawn. Commonplace in the early days of Los Angeles and Denver. Also used to describe certain saloons when men were killed the night before. “Lambert’s only had two men for breakfast.”
Wamble-Cropped - Sick at the stomach, and figuratively, wretched, humiliated.
Deadening - When new areas were settled in the west, “clearings” were made by cutting down the trees. Others were “girdled,” or When the majority of trees are deadened, the clearing was called a deadening.
Horse Thief Special - A raisin and boiled rice dish.
Plenty of others would be easy to figure out from the context.
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Post by bixaorellana on Mar 30, 2009 22:38:02 GMT
Hmmm. I believe some of those expressions are simply old-fashioned usages from England that stuck longer among rural people, not just those in the West -- acock, afeared, ajee, for instance. Quite a few others seem as though they were in use both in the US and England -- apple jack (still used today) and at sea (ditto). And some of the words and definitions make me question the knowledge of the lexicon maker.
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