[Ads-l] Hager-ma growley

[Jonathan Lighter]

Here's some colorful (and surely romanticized) Civil War grousing, from
"D. S. Forbes" [actually S. W. Lewis] *History of the Thirty-Days’ Campaign
of the Sixty-Eighth Regiment, New York State National Guards* (Fredonia,
N.Y.: pvtly ptd., 1863).

P. 20:

Gentlemen, by smut, hark, and I'll just naturally put a flea in your ears.
Now, you see this is a grab game, and if we don't keep our eyes peeled,
we'll get euchered. These gol-blasted commissioned officers are going to be
powerfully patriotic and great Union-loving sons of ------- until the thing
is all fastened and the knots all tied. When things look smutty and danger
begins to look a little red in relation to our bones and sinners, why
they'll resign, and we poor, unlucky, cat-hauled devils may go to H —l, for
all of them; they'll resign their commissions and are all sound on the
goose.


P.45:

"I can just naturally look through this d----d clap-trap game, and I ain't
going to stand it; now that's what's the matter with the mule. ...  Old
Snipe, (Knipe,) the lop-eared, penurious, snake-eyed Hager-ma growley, is
going to slip us across the Potomac, and clear on down to where it is
hotter than Balshazzar's furnace."

P. 49:
"The old whiskey-drinking pop-gun; he's gone home, the old lily-livered
cuss....  Knipe, the old, black,wall-eyed, crabbed, fiery-mouthed,
flint-pated devil, will be here in about ten minutes, frothing and foaming
because we ain't down there in the scorching Virginia swamps."

"By smut" and "smutty" may euphemize "shit" and "shitty," but the
historical record makes that uncertain.  To "euchre" is to victimize by
trickery.  A "grab game" is a swindle, and "sound on the goose" usually
means "sound in one's political views."  Here it may simply mean "safe and
sound," but that is conjecture.

"That's what's the matter with the mule" elaborates the19th C.
catch-phrase, "That's what's the matter!"  It meant pretty much what it
means today, but seems to have been used frequently for its own sake -
possibly a quotation from somewhere?

"Hager-ma growley" may be a one-off creation. The regiment was camped near
Hagerstown, Md.

JL



-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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