"shade-tree mechanic", not in (some) dictionaries

[Stephen Goranson]

Quoting Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>:

> At 4:56 PM -0500 2/24/09, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>> On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 4:27 PM, Laurence Horn
>> <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>>>
>>>  Emmylou Harris's new album "All I Intended To Be" contains a
>>>  particularly fine song "Broken Down Man's Lament", which contains a
>>>  line I was sure I was mishearing, but it turns out I wasn't:
>>>
>>>  "I was a good shade-tree mechanic."
>>>
>>>  More fully, the quatrain in question runs as follows, confirmed by
>>>  both the enclosed lyrics and various web sites:
>>>
>>>  ======================
>>>  I was a good shade-tree mechanic
>>>  So I sent myself to school
>>>  They smoothed out my rough edges
>>>  In my hand they put new tools
>>>  ======================
>>>
>>>  No help from the usual sources, but urbandictionary.com comes
>>> through nicely:
>> [snip]
>>
>> Barry Popik has it on his site with citations back to 1942:
>>
>> http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/texas/entry/shade_tree_mechanic/
>>
>> In a 2005 thread here I noted some other variants, including "shade-tree
>> engineer" and "shade-tree philosopher".
>>
>> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0506C&L=ads-l&P=15454
>
> I obviously had plumb forgot that thread, and hadn't checked Barry's
> site.  Is the idea that you're doing the car-repair, or engineering,
> or philosophizing in the comfort of your old shade-tree?  Since there
> seem to be no dictionary entries, it's hard to get a bead on the
> etymology.  Or, for that matter, the relevant isogloss--it is really
> localized to Texan and points west, or found elsewhere in the south?
> We need to get us some shade-tree mechanics in Connecticut!
>
> LH

The Cambridge MA Car Talk guys (at least one of them) on NPR used the term.

Stephen
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org