I remember when I was about 6 that on several occasions my eyes would be glued shut upon awakening. My mother called it "matter" as she used a warm washcloth to open my eyes. This may be an extreme form of "sleepy dust".
Added in edit: I see that this sense is in 19b of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Emmett
Yes, definitely "matter" when I was little, and elaborated as "yellow matter custard" in "I Am The Walrus".
Also simply called "sleep", as in "wipe the sleep from my eyes" in the 1971 hit "One Fine Morning".
Ron Draney said:
Yes, definitely "matter" when I was little, and elaborated as "yellow matter custard" in "I Am The Walrus".
Yes, but that "yellow matter custard" was "dripping from a dead dog's eye," at least the way I sang it when one of my old bands covered it. I hope it's not the same thing as the "sleep" in our eyes when we wake up. I really don't know what the Beatles' lyric means, but in the context of the song—well, I still don't know what it means.
Hey, Martha and Grant! The quote to which Grant referred is as follows:
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
- James D. Nicoll
Mr. Nicoll blogs regularly on LiveJournal at http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/ . He has lamented a time or two on his journal that people frequently misattribute his quote to other people, or say it's "anonymous," when with a 10-second Google search, you can find out it was him.
As for what they call people from Alabama…I most often hear "Alabamian," but where the heck does that stupid 'i' come from? I make a special point of carefully enunciating "Alabaman," and look defiantly in people's eyes and dare anyone to correct me.
I'm from Alabama, but currently live in Atlanta, Georgia. And yes, it's "Atlantan."
I am so glad that this episode included a little something about locals' names for themselves. I will definitely have to find that book, Labels for Locals.
My husband sometimes refers to people who won't eat eggs or dairy as /VAY-gunz/, and I laugh because that's a locals-name for people from that big shiny gambling hotspot in Nevada, but /VEE-guns/ would be from a well-known, bright blue star. So perhaps the diet-restricted individuals should henceforth be known as /VEJ-unz/?
Before I was a /VAY-gun/, I was a cheesehead, but I grew up a little to the south (yes I was a Flatlander). My father was a Troll, as opposed to being a Yooper. Sometimes I would ask people from other states if they has similar names for people from neighboring states. Nobody else admitted to having teasing nicknames for their neighbors.
There is no way this is a western-great-lakes-only thing. So what are some of the other (externally applied) state names out there?