Micah in Council Bluffs, Iowa, reports reading an account of a fistfight between 19th-century newspaper editors in which one was hit with a sockdolager, meaning “a knockout punch” or a “heavy, decisive blow,” and wonders if that’s the source of sock, meaning to “strike hard.” Actually, sockdolager is probably an elaboration of sock. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Bookshop|Amazon), Mark Twain uses sockdolager to denote a clap of thunder. The word sockdolagizing is one of the last words heard by Abraham Lincoln, because it’s part of the play Our American Cousin by Tom Taylor (Bookshop|Amazon), which he was watching when he was assassinated. This is part of a complete episode.
A Winter Dictionary (Bookshop|Amazon) by Paul Anthony Jones includes some words to lift your spirits. The verb whicken involves the lengthening of days in springtime, a variant of quicken, meaning “come to life.” Another word, breard, is...
Rosalind from Montgomery, Alabama, says her mother used to scold her for acting like a starnadle fool. The more common version of this term is starnated fool, a term that appears particular to Black English, and appears in the work of such writers...
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