Cowboy Lingo?

[Page Stephens]

There are a lot of terms Curly's poem which are idiosyncratic to cowboys at
least to my knowledge.

A few:

learned to tighten his reins

center-fire saddle

gunsel (in the sense of a person who can't find his saddle with both hands
not a queer or person who handles a gun)

silver trimmed rig

There are others but I don't have the time to pick them out. In general,
however, it is the inside jokes about cowboys which distinguish it.

I do not know about grammar but I ain't a grammarian.

As to the mark of the poet as opposed to the cowboy.

One thing cowboys are noted for is their poetry. Perhaps this is due to the
loneliness of ranch life -- I can vouch for this since I spent a couple of
years living on a small ranch a few miles outside Noplace, Arkansas which is
about ten miles outside Plumb Lost -- but for many many years The Western
Horseman has published poetry and today there are many cowboy poetry get
togethers in different areas of the US. The best known cowboy poet these
days is Baxter Black but in earlier days there were Curly, of course,
Haywire Mac McClintock, Badger Clark, D.J. O'Malley, Romaine Loudermilk and
many others including if you want to Owen Wister the author of The Virginian
who wrote 10,000 Cattle Straying.

By the way Curly Fletcher's best known poem/song is The Strawberry Roan
which he himself parodied as The Castration of The Strawberry Roan so
according to legend he could do it before somebody else did.

The difference between the two versions can be summarized in comparing the
first four lines of each:

I was standing around just a spending my time.
Nothing else to spend not even a dime.
When a fellow comes up and he says I suppose
That you're a bronk rider by the looks of your clothes.

as opposed to:

I was hanging around in a house of ill fame.
Laid up with a twist of a hustling dame
When a hop headed pig with his nose full of coke
Beat me out of my whore and left me stone broke.

A story about The Open Book which I heard in the deep dark past was that
Curly was sitting at a bar with Slim Pickens and mentioned the fact that one
time he had written the poem but had long since lost any copy of it. Slim
then said not to worry because he had memorized it and proceeded to recite
it.

I cannot vouch for the veracity of either of these stories but they make for
good telling which is what cowboys love to do since they have so much time
on their hands.

Page Stephens

PS. When I got out to Ohio where they all ride English I was puzzled about
how they rode horses until I learned that:

walk = walk
trot = jog
canter = lope
and gallop = gallop

----- Original Message -----
From: "Beverly Flanigan" <flanigan at OHIO.EDU>
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Sent: Friday, December 05, 2003 9:58 AM
Subject: Re: Cowboy Lingo?


> ---------------------- Information from the mail
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Beverly Flanigan <flanigan at OHIO.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Cowboy Lingo?
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----
>
> I have no doubt that this poem characterizes (some?) cowboys, but it says
> nothing about the dialect they used beyond some (probable) lexical
> items--most of them shared throughout the English-speaking world.  The
only
> grammatical diagnostic I see (beyond the commonplace "ain't" and "I've
> rode") is "plumb," as in "plumb soured" and "gone plumb to seed."  In both
> cases it's an intensifying adverb and is commonly used in the South
Midland
> even today.  And the "surely" in stanza 7 is the mark of the poet, not the
> cowboy.
>