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by Peter Berryman

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May 2004

The Hep Folkslanger

Rummaging through my big fat fluffy overstuffed file of weird ideas for Whither Zither columns, I came across an interesting xerox. Actually, it is a rexerox by me of a xerox which was sent to me by my pal Paul Fieber, which makes him a xeroxer and me a rexeroxer. Rexeroxer is one of my all-time favorite words.

Scribbled upon it is "7-1-97 Wall St Jrnl," so it is not only a rexerox from the last decade, but from the last millennium. The title is "Should the Big Eye Lead to a Greenout, Hey, Have a Homer," and the subtitle "Don't Understand? A Volume On the Lingo of Antarctica Will Make It Crystal Clear."

Geraldine Brooks, the author of the article, goes on to review the Dictionary of Antarctic English, by Bernadette Hince, which was to have been published "...late next year," meaning, I assume, late in 1998. A Google finds that it wasn't published until 2000, but has been available since then from CSIRO Publishing via Amazon.com at $44.95.

The review by Ms Brooks of the book by Ms Hince brings up such curiosities of world-bottom slanguage as donga for sleeping quarters, BOLOWs for Burned Out Left-Over Winterers, tabulars for icebergs broken off from the main ice sheet, flat topped and usually more than 10 miles long, and growlers for smallish hunks of decaying 'berg. Hoosh means stew. Getting slotted means falling into a crevasse. I wonder if getting hooshed means getting drunk. Imagine being slotted because you're hooshed on a growler.

Regarding the review's title, big eye is insomnia caused by 24 hours of either day or night, depending on the season; a greenout is a shock to the system from returning to the vegetation of home, and a homer is a homemade beer. The scientists down there are reported to make pretty good brew with their scientific methodology, sterile tubes and beakers, and hellish stretches of seclusion.

Anyway, since I'm writing a folk music column, this caused me to wonder if there weren't folk music slang terms heaped up somewhere. There are endless bins of other slang collections and histories on and off the internet. Jazz arrived with whole bongoes full of slang. Many jazz terms, like ax for instrument, have been adopted by folksters, rocksters, and country cats alike, and many others, like bag (as in hey man, what's your bag?)(which the hippies replaced with thing, as in hey man, what's your thing) were used for a bit throughout the entire undergrad hepdom.

Other jazz words and phrases were taken up and are still used by the general throngs, as cool, disc jockey, the Big Apple, and so on. Rap and other forms of music are notoriously fertile compost from which slang can sproing. But what about folk music, in the sense of the newish folk scene of the fifties and beyond?

Maybe there is a fecund folk music slang mound out there somewhere, but I couldn't find it. There are a few notable examples of the stuff that come to mind, such as hootenanny, folkie, and navel gazer. A few more I can think of came from various subgroups of folk music, like breakdown from bluegrass, bluegrass itself, doghouse bass, squeezebox, stomach Steinway, and guitbox. There are more specific instrument slangs too, like archtop, cutaway, and capo (Etymology: short for capotasto, from Italian, literally, head of fingerboard). Playing style names abound, like boomalacka, frailing, and clawhammer, which all refer to particular banjo strums.

Much slang is sprinkled WITHIN the lyrics of folk songs, of course. But mostly it comes from whatever occupation or avocation or environment the song is covering. Like seagoing slang -- yar, gaff -- in sea chanteys. Or billabong and grog in Australian songs. Or peg, awl, warp, weft and dropspindle in work songs. But it's time we peers of A Mighty Wind came up with a few new ones. For starters, though some of these probably have developed co-evolutionarily in various corners of the folding chair universe of folk society huddles and weekly songswaps:

Folka: Woody Guthrie song played by the Rainbow Valley Dutchmen.
Pickle: Tickle the strings lightly with a pick
Axwake: The wrinkle in a shirt, tie, or vest caused by playing a guitar
Harmlessonica: A harmonica played gently
Kum Bye Yah Hey: Wisconsin folk music
Singashort: A two minute singalong
Whirlygig: A round robin performance, or performing on a baggage carousel
Pending: A dent in a new guitar's back caused by a Bic in the shirt pocket
Dobrotomy: Surgically removing the ability to play slide guitar
Celtick-tock: Olde Tyme
Blewgrass: Stoned banjo music
Unclogging: Folk dancing backwards
Maccordion: Squeezebox for the rest of us.
Folkker: Acoustic air-guitar player
Strumble: Make a mistake with a flat pick
Festivalve: Main gate at a folkeree
Pickture: Close-up of guitar strum
Fiddylan: Playing Desolaton Row on violin
Resin Up the Bodhran: To mix metaphors
Autoharpo: Marx Brother's button zither
Guitarheel: Folkie from North Carolina
Cukelele: Hawaiian four stringed vegetable
Duover: Simon and Garfunkel reunion
Kazooka: Lethal hum amplifier
Squares: Rounds for nerds
Turbanjo: A four stringed Muslim headdress
Wal-Martin: Cheap knockoff of a good guitar
Mandolinoleum: Plucky flooring
Balladonna: Poisonously long folk song
Dulcimurder: Death by folk music; see Balladonna and Kazooka

Have any to add?

My thanks to Paul Fieber for starting me on this melody, even if it took me six or seven years to tune up, and to Ms Brooks, Ms Hince, and the Wall Street Journal as mentioned.