Steve, a singer-songwriter from Rock Springs, Wyoming, shares some slang he picked up while months riding the rails and busking. Spanging refers to panhandling, from asking for “spare change.” The term bull refers to a type of security guard. Riding junk refers to traveling on a slow train. The pusher engine is called the Cadillac. The book On the Fly!: Hobo Literature and Songs, 1879–1941 (Bookshop|Amazon) edited by Iain McIntyre is a fine collection of stories, poems, songs, and articles from and about that subculture. 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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