[Ads-l] Another early "Rosin Heel" (May, 1826)

[Jonathan Lighter]

"Gum head" is good too.

JL

On Wed, Jan 22, 2020 at 6:17 PM Bonnie Taylor-Blake <b.taylorblake at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Earlier this month I had mentioned "Rosin Heel," a term I hadn't known
> before (and which doesn't appear in the OED or in Merriam-Webster), as a
> predecessor to "Tar Heel."
>
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2020-January/156299.html
>
> I had included a very early "Rosin Heels" (with application to poorer
> residents of the Florida panhandle) that had appeared in a recollection of
> travels in the Mississippi Valley. This book was published in March 1826,
> though the reprinted letters within seem to have been written in about
> 1824.
>
> In any event, here's another early "Rosin Heel," this time used with regard
> to a Mississippian.
>
> -- Bonnie
>
> -------------------------
>
> [A correspondent writes from Natchez, dating his letter to 5 May 1826.]
>
> "One of the disputants was a short, fat, rich independent looking fellow,
> with a large gold watch-key and chain, hanging from his fob, and a gold
> headed cane dangling in his right hand, and as I have since understood is a
> rich planter in this neighborhood; he most uncivilly told the other he had
> no right to an opinion upon the subject of a lighthouse; that he was a
> rosin heel, and should not offer an opinion upon a subject of national
> concern. The other who was dressed in plain homespun, with a long ox-whip
> in his hand, replied by calling the other a gum head, and told him he
> reckoned he had seen some people with golden purses with very gummy heads;
> that it was not every man who had a long purse that had a long head."
>
> (In the paragraph that follows the above text the writer refers to this
> fellow as "Mr. Rosin Heel.")
>
> From *The Ariel*, Natchez, Mississippi, 23 May 1826, p. 6. (The untitled
> piece to which this text belongs begins on page 5.)
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


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