Cowboy Lingo?

[Beverly Flanigan]

Costner is really showing his ignorance about American dialects (are we
surprised?).  Calling these representations of very commonly used
nonstandard English (in both Britain and America) "Victorian" is like
calling Appalachian English "Elizabethan."  Maybe he read some of these
forms ("them that," for example, and "writ" and intransitive "laying") in a
Dickens novel and thought that "somehow" 19th century English had been
transported to the Wild West of America.

Ain't nothing "jocular" about these forms; and I don't see a problem with
singular "it," since the referent seems to be one warrant (either one of
the two mentioned).

At 10:06 AM 12/2/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>original message follows:
>
>Date:    Mon, 1 Dec 2003 01:54:50 -0800
>From:    Chris Dacolias <hepkel10 at YAHOO.COM>
>Subject: Re: Cowboy Lingo?
>
>My question regards a dialect spoken in the west after
>the civil war and before the turn of the century in
>the American west.  Some might call this a version of
>"cowboy language".  This dialect was consistently used
>during the recent film "Open Range" a western set in
>1888 starring Kevin Costner.  In an interview, Costner
>referred to the dialect as "Victorian language".  I
>didn't know quite what he meant.
>
>An example of the dialect follows:
>"We got a warrant sworn for attempted murder for them
>that tried to kill the boy who's laying over there at
>the Doc's, trying to stay alive. Swore out another one
>for them that murdered the big fella you had in your
>cell. Only ours ain't writ by no tin star, bought and
>paid for, Marshall. It's writ by us, and we aim to
>enforce it."
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>I'm a little suspicious of the quote.  It is addressed to someone who has the
>job title of "Marshall" [sic---should be only one "l"].  In the WIld West,
>"marshal" was the title for two different law enforcement positions:
>1) a municipal police officer (now archaic)
>2) a US Marshal (a position that still exists today)
>(If I remember correctly, the Earp brothers in the Tombstone days held down
>both types of marshal positions)
>
>Both types of marshals frequently wore metal badges.  Since the Civil War the
>attributive noun "tin" has meant any type of thin sheet metal (e.g. lightly
>armored Union gunboats in the Civil War  were known as "tinclads", or L. Frank
>Baum's "Tin Woodsman" (Wizard of Oz, 1900) who, since he rusted, was obviously
>made of sheet iron or sheet steel rather than tin.)  Hence it was not
>uncommon for a marshal's badge, and by extension the marshal himself, to
>be called a
>"tin star".
>
>Therefore the speaker, by using the phrase "tin star", is gratuitously
>insulting the (town or US) marshal he is addressing.
>
>I seem to recall having heard "them that" for "those who" in jocular
>expressions, the kind in which ungrammatical usages are used for emphasis,
>e.g. "The
>Golden Rule: Them that has the gold, rules".
>
>"laying" for "lying" is a common grammatical error, much commented on by my
>grade school grammar books.  "Ain't" needs no commentary.  The only other
>violations of formal grammar and diction are the missing "by" clause after
>"sworn",
>the missing subject in the second sentence, the singular "It" as subject of
>the last sentence, and the quaint-sounding use of "writ" as a verb.
>
>There is a play on words that seems to have snuck by the scriptwriter.  A
>warrant is a "writ", and hence the speaker and his colleagues have "writ a
>writ".
>
>                - James A. Landau