Cindy in Spokane, Washington, says her father would bid his loved ones good-bye by saying tap ’er light. The phrase comes from miners’ slang of the early 1900s and is a gentle admonition to take care to avoid cave-ins or prematurely detonating explosives. High-grade, meaning to select the best items for oneself out of a larger collection of items, is another example of slang from the mines. It’s a reference to a worker selecting some of the best ore and pocketing it instead of turning it over to the company. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Tap ’Er Light”
Hi there. You have A Way with Words.
Hi, my name is Cindy Fine. I’m calling from Spokane, Washington. And I have a question about some colloquialisms that I heard from my father when he was growing up as a child in the mid-1930s to late 1930s. His family lived in Powell County, Montana. That’s east of Missoula, west of Helena, and his father worked as a miner.
So the terms that my dad would use, one was tapper light. As someone was leaving to kind of say farewell, good luck, be well, he would send them off with that phrase, tapper light. And I think that that comes from a mining term like using dynamite to work with, and you would want to be careful and tap it lightly.
And then the other one is high grade. So he would use that like we’re passing the salad bowl around, and he would take all of the best tomatoes out of the bowl, and he would say, I’m going to high grade it. And maybe that comes from like taking the best ore out for yourself. I don’t know.
But I love these little phrases, and I wonder if you can kind of clarify my understanding of them and maybe know of any others.
Well, it sounds like you’re on the right track, frankly. It sounds like you really nailed them. Your granddad was a miner. You picked up some language, and that sounds about right to me.
The tapper light one really I find to be very affectionate and is still used somewhat today. It’s kind of localized now in Butte, Montana. But one time it was fairly widespread in the West. You can find it in old newspapers throughout all of the mining region in California, Nevada, and other places.
And it is what you said. It’s about trying to be gentle when you’re mining to avoid premature detonation of your explosives. But it’s also about being relatively gentle to avoid cave-ins and rock slides and all these other things that can cause death.
Mining seems like a brute force job, and it kind of is, but it also involves a lot of care and a lot of safety and a lot of precaution. So, yeah, tap or light. It’s like saying drive safely when someone leaves the house.
-huh.
Take care.
Take care.
Take it easy.
The high grade is still used today. So imagine back in the day when things were a little less sophisticated and it was basically guys in holes with pickaxes, you know, digging.
And sometimes if they came across a good vein or a particularly good nugget
And they could pocket it, they would pocket it.
They’d take the best stuff right off the top.
And the harder to get ore would be what would go out in the wheelbarrows
And the rail cars and what have you.
So these days you might high grade the M&Ms out of the trail mix when you’re hiking with somebody.
Exactly like that.
And that too dates to the early 1900s.
Cherry pick, basically, is what most of us would say today.
Or to pick over, right?
Also used in logging and fishing, by the way, to talk about stealing.
A common trick even now is you sell land for timber,
But a devious person will go through and pick out the best trees before selling the land and take them.
And that’s high grading those trees.
Also called in logging, gutting a show.
To gut a show.
Didn’t know that.
So anyway, yeah, so both these terms are mining.
I just love that they’re still out there.
It feels like sometimes that the colorful language of the world is being washed out and replaced by stuff that doesn’t have the charm for me.
Like video game language, which is fine.
It just doesn’t feel as close to the earth to me.
Yeah, Cindy, do you still use these?
Not often, but it just kind of has a little soft spot in my heart when I do hear them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I feel the same way, even though I don’t have the tradition of miners in my family.
I feel the same way.
Those linguistic heirlooms.
So, Cindy, thanks for your call.
We really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thanks for calling.
Bye-bye.
Our show is heard throughout the mining region even now in Northern California and Nevada
And Wyoming and Yellowstone and that area.
I’d love to hear more mining language, frankly.
I think it’s out there.
Bring it.
Or email words@waywordradio.org.
