The modifier lamming or lammin’, is used as an intensifier, as in “That container is lammin’ full,” meaning “That container is extremely full.” There’s a whole class of intensifying words like this in English, which have to do with the idea of hitting, banging, thumping, or striking. Another example: larrupin’. The word lammin’ in particular popped up in a bunch of cowboy novels after Zane Grey popularized the term in his books. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Lamming”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi.
Hi, who’s this?
This is Greg Cantrell from Fort Worth, Texas.
Hello, Greg, welcome.
How you doing?
Well, I’ve got a word that I grew up hearing, and it never occurred to me that it was anything out of the ordinary, until a friend of mine the other day, I used it in normal conversation, and the friend that I was with said, what does that mean?
And it’s actually a phrase, and the phrase refers to something that’s really full. You can’t put anything else in it. And the phrase is lambing full, like L-A-M-M-I-N-G. Of course, here in Texas, we dropped that I-N-G, and it’s just lambing full.
Lambing full.
Yeah, and so I got curious, and I’ll just Google that up and find out what the origins, and I couldn’t find it anywhere on the Internet. I checked the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s a mystery.
Well, how about that?
Not for long.
Not for long.
There’s a whole class of words in English that ultimately turned out to be intensifiers. And a surprising number of these words have to do with hitting or banging or thumping somebody. And this is one of those.
The lamin here, and it’s often paired with other words. You can say lamin full or lamin full, but you might say lamin huge or lamin big or lamin long. So the lamin is used as an intensifier, and it connects back to an old British dialect word that is in a number of old dialect collections that means to hit or to strike or to punch or that sort of thing.
And even before it came to the United States, it had already started to take on this use of… How should I put it? The intensifying use.
Striking. Larapin.
Well, yeah, yeah. That’s a striking blouse you have on.
Thank you.
It’s literally related to a word that has to do with hitting.
Or, doesn’t that beat all?
Well, beat. I mean, there’s different beats in competition, but anyway, you have this whole collection of words. That’s a whopping big sandwich you have there, right? Also about hitting. It’s really interesting.
So that’s where in general that it comes from, and you can find it, and I want to ask you this. Do you read Zane Grey novels, or have you ever?
I can’t say that I’ve ever actually read one.
Because he was lamb and fond of this.
He really was.
He used it in numerous books. And if you read Westerns, you’ll often find that modern cowboy writers, people who just kind of write in the genre, will often use his language, and they’ve borrowed the term from Zane Grey novels that are 100 years old into their own modern works.
The word kind of has this other life in cowboy fiction. My friend who called it to my attention was born and raised in Kentucky, in central Kentucky, and had never heard the word.
Okay.
Not surprised.
Not surprised.
Yeah, I grew up in Kentucky, never heard it. It’s not overly common. It does tend to be mainly southern when it pops up in the United States, though.
All right.
Well, thank you so much.
Greg, it’s been lamb and good fun.
Our pleasure.
Thanks for calling.
All right.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
You can email us your questions about language, words@waywordradio.org, or find us on Facebook and Twitter. And you can always call us 877-929-9673.
