Informal English: Puncture Ladies, Egg Harbors, Mississippi Marbles, and Other C

Bone-orchard: in the Southwest slang for a cemetery

Chawswizzled: "confounded" in Nebraskan idiom. "I'll be chawswizzled!"

Leather-ears: to Cape Cod inhabitants, a person of slow comprehension

Puncture lady: a southwestern expression for a woman who prefers to sit on the sidelines at a dance and gossip rather than dance, often puncturing someone's reputation

Whether the entries are unexpected twists on familiar-sounding expressions or based on curious old customs, this wide-ranging assortment of vernacular Americanisms will amaze and amuse even the most hard-boiled curmudgeon.
作者简介 Jeffrey Kacirk is the author of Forgotten English, The Word Museum, and Altered English, as well as a daily calendar based on Forgotten English. He can be found on the web at www.forgottenenglish.com and lives in Marin County, California.
文摘 Introduction

The conversations we hear around us are often filled with words and phrases that would be out of place in formal writing. The following collection is a tiny sample of the vernacular expressions that have been used over the last four centuries in North America. I have tried to present a diverse cross section of these gems, drawing from different-size communities and various walks of life ranging from white-collar and blue-collar workers to hoboes. Throughout the gathering and editing process, my focus has been on forgotten and less commonly encountered Americanisms, although some are still used today.

Growing up, I was fortunate to live in a number of linguistically distinct parts of America -- Milwaukee, San Diego, New Orleans, and briefly New York and Portland, Oregon -- and visited other parts of America's "lower 48" and Canada as time permitted. This serendipitous introduction to North America's cultural diversity planted a seed in me that led roundabout to this book. In Louisiana, such phrases as "like a one-legged man in a behind-kickin' contest," describing a person experiencing difficulties, regularly whetted my appetite for entertaining localisms. Since my interest was piqued in the 1970s, I have enjoyed countless moments just listening to people talk.

Elizabethan English in America?

It is intriguing that more than a few current "Americanisms" originated in Shakespeare's Britain before the first European settlements were founded in America. Baggage, for example, a fifteenth-century word used by Shakespeare in As You Like It and The Winter's Tale, faded in England during the 1700s, leaving most of its duties to luggage. Meanwhile, both of these terms thrived among English transplants across the Atlantic. In fact, baggage is now found in more than two dozen combinations in America, such as baggage-car, and is even used metaphorically in the realm of pop psycholo
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