The highly specialized vocabulary of people who work outdoors, communicating with sled dogs, a word from the sport of rock-climbing, church key, browse line, smeuse, nitnoy, mommick, zawn, zwer, boom dog, and I think my pig is whistling.
There’s a word hole in a hedge or wall made by the repeated passage of a small animal. It’s called a smeuse. This dialect term from the UK is one of hundreds from Landmarks, a book of essays in which Robert Macfarlane seeks to reanimate our connection with nature by showcasing some of the specialized language involving features of the natural world.
A listener doing volunteer work in Tempe, Arizona, is puzzled when a co-worker refers to a bottle opener as a church key.
Beta in Rock-Climbing
A rock climber in Omaha, Nebraska, wonders about the term beta, which her fellow climbers use to refer to information about a particular route. It comes from the old practice of using Betamax video to record information about a climb. A good source for the vocabulary used in this sport is Matt Samet’s The Climbing Dictionary: Mountaineering Slang, Terms, Neologisms, & Lingo.
Ish Word Puzzle
Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s punny puzzle involves words that end in -ish. For example, something that’s somewhat like a mark used to identify livestock might be what word that ends in -ish?
Gee and Haw in Dog-Sledding
In dogsledding, the exclamations gee and haw are used for left and right respectively. A woman in Fairbanks, Alaska, uses those terms when training her dogs for the Iditarod and wonders about their origin. (As promised, here are her pups.)
The term nitnoy (sometimes spelled nit-noi) means a little bit, and most likely derives from a Thai term that means the same thing.
Zwen and Zwan
Robert Macfarlane’s book Landmarks, a collection of dialect terms for features of the natural landscape, includes zwen, the sound of partridges taking off, and zawn, a wave-smashed chasm in a cliff.
Is “Sassy” Gendered and Derogatory?
A young woman in Las Cruces, New Mexico, is conflicted after a professor writes a glowing recommendation for her that also describes her as sassy. Isn’t sassy a gendered term that should be avoided? And if so, how should she handle the situation?
A trucker in Glasgow, Kentucky, wonders about the term boom dog, a device used to secure things on a trailer. The boom may be inspired by a ship’s boom. The word dog has long been used in a variety of ways to refer to something that holds something else tightly in place.
A caller from coastal North Carolina says that in her part of the country, people use the word mommicked to mean flustered or deeply frustrated. It derives from mammock, which means to tear or muddle, and was used that way in Shakespeare’s time. She reports they’ll also say “I’m bent double for I’m laughing really hard,” and use the phrase in the merkels to describe someone’s lost their way — also said as in the myrtles, or in other words, having wandered away from a cleared path.