Come Selahway With Me…

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In keeping with the Mooner theme this week, I wanted to share some of my vocabulary that I used for the story. Part of what I love about the logging era of history is the language. It’s so rough and crass and gloriously beautiful. There’s a real musicality about it. It didn’t make writing Mooner easy, but I can’t imagine the story without it.

Now I frequented a lot of historical sites and a lot of language sites, but my very favorite lumberjack dictionary is here   This one is also fun. But for the sake of the story, here is a list of most of the terms and their definitions.

mackinaw – heavy coat that could keep out the weather, usually brightly colored

shanty man – one of the terms for loggers/lumberjacks

girl house – brothel

turkey – the grain sack that many kept their personal effects in

firewater – alcohol

swamper – brush cutter

pants rabbits – lice and other body critters

pat on the lip – punch in the face

hit the pike – quiting the job

blanket fever – the habit of staying in bed when the other lumberjacks are up; a lazy lumberjack

floater – itinterant worker, also a hobo

blanket hoist – a game and punishment, also an initiation for newcomers. A lumberjack would be put in a blanket while the others grabbed the sides and hoisted him into the air a few times

mooner – a mythical creature in a logging woods

limbing out – cutting the limbs from a tree

dunghister – a farmer; to call a true lumberjack a farmer was fighting words

get his teeth fixed – go to  a prostitute

sluiced – killed

caulks – boots used by loggers, spiked on the bottom to keep lumberjacks from slipping off logs when they rode them down river (also to drive moss between logs or spikes on horseshoes)

smallpox – the resulting marks/wound when a lumberjack would kick someone with his caulks on

catcher’s ax – narrow ax with five-foot handle, used to cut side marks in logs before they were floated down river

yaps –  crazy

fever n’ ague – fever and ache, term used for various ailments

dozy – moldy

knock his ears down – to thrash someone

wolf tree – large old tree with no value as timber but can house wildlife

rot gut – cheap whiskey

sent down the road – fired

river rat – lumberjack who worked on a log drive

skid road – road made from half-buried logs used to ease the dragging of logs