Trombonist Benjamin Jacobs-El, who toured with jazz great Lionel Hampton, calls from Huntsville, Alabama, to say that Hampton regularly addressed friends and band members as gate, as in Hey, gates, how’re you doing? Is that because good jazz swings and a gate swings, too? It appears that’s the case, although it also may be a reference to Gatemouth, one of trumpeter Louis Armstrong’s many nicknames. When he played, audiences would shout Swing it, Gate! It’s also possible that Gate evolved into cat, as in a “hip or cool character,” a term also influenced by tomcat and the sly characteristics associated with a streetwise male feline. This is part of a complete episode.
A member of the ski patrol at Vermont’s Sugarbush Resort shares some workplace slang. Boilerplate denotes hard-packed snow with a ruffled pattern that makes skis chatter, death cookies are random chunks that could cause an accident, and...
A resident of Michigan’s scenic Beaver Island shares the term, boodling, which the locals use to denote the social activity of leisurely wandering the island, often with cold fermented beverages. There have been various proposed etymologies...
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