(2 of 3)
Argot Born. One day in '92, sitting around the Anytime Saloon, Reg and Tom Burger and the Duff brothers started putting some of their old Scotch-Irish dialect words together with some on-the-spot code words into a language that the enemies—be they womenfolk, their rivals, their elders, their children—could not possibly understand. It caught on, rapidly losing its value as a code; soon "Boontlingers" and their friends were eagerly trying to shark (con) each other with new inventions.
It was more fun to call coffee zeese instead of coffee, because it recalled old Z.C., a cook who made coffee so strong you could float an egg on it. Or to call working ottin', after an industrious logger named Otto. To call a big fire in the grate a jeffer, because old Jeff Vestal always had a big fire going. To say charlie ball for embarrass, because old Charlie Ball, a local Indian, was so shy he never said a word. To say forbes, short for four bits, and tubes, for two bits. To call a phone a buckywalter after Walter Levi, known back then for having a phone at home. To say ball for good, because the old standard of quality was the Ball-Band shoe, with the red ball on the box.
Other words came right out of old Scotch-Irish dialect—wee for small, kimmie for man, tweed for young man, deek for look at. Still other words were borrowed from the Porno Indians, who moved off to a reservation after an early settler set up his general store in the middle of their camping ground. A few words are corruptions of French, like gorm (gourmand) for eat.
Gorming has its full terminology. Pie is charlie brown because the latter had to have pie at every meal. Dom is chicken, after the Dominique, a particular breed. Broadie is a cow or a steak. Gano is the name of a very hard kind of apple they used to grow in the valley and, by extension, Boontling for all apples. Bacon is bowrp (a contraction of boar pig), eggs are easters, as in "If I don't shy to the sluggin' region [sleeping place] soon, I may as well set me a jeffer and gorm bowrp and casters."
For a child learning his nursery rhymes, Old Mother Hubbard would go like this: "The old dame piked for the chigrel nook/ For gorms for her ball belljeemer;/ The gorms had shied, the nook was strung,/ And the ball belljeemer had neemer."* Then there were the code names for nonch (not-nice) subjects. To go to bed with a girl was to burlap her, because one day in the 1890s someone walked into the general store, found no clerk, checked the storeroom and found him making love to a young lady on a pile of sacks. The word caught on, although it got competition from ricky-chow, an onomatopoeic description of the twanging bedsprings in the Boonville Hotel's honeymoon suite.
Some of the language was developed to cushion tragedy: everybody feared having their sheep frozen or starved by a sudden change in the weather. That was too big a disaster just to report baldly, so they would say "That frigid perel [cold rain, which resembles little pearls] made many white spots [dead lambs]. There'll be nemer croppies [no more sheep, which crop the grass] come boche season [boche, meaning deer, is derived from a Pomo word]."