Homebodies - The conversation was animated

Details

Published on Saturday, October 24, 2015

By Rita Friesen

The Neepawa Banner

As we drove along the country roads, the topic drifted and shifted. Several times one of our party of four would say – google that. We all vowed to do just that when we arrived home.

Afraid that I would forget the topics covered, I asked a passenger to jot down some of the titles. We started with ‘rub elbows with’, and one reader in the group said it was the same as hobnob. So hobnob was the hit word. “In the eighteenth century drinkers would toast each other alternately with the word ‘hob or nob’ or ‘hob and nob’, probably meaning to ‘give or take’, or ‘have or have not’. Toasting each other in this way was “to drink hob or nob,” or from the 19th century, to simply “hobnob.” At times crossing social barriers, a fellowship of the bar. 

Then we discussed the difference between flotsam and jetsam.  Flotsam, apparently, is debris in the water that was not deliberately thrown overboard, often the result of a shipwreck or accident. Jetsam, on the other hand, is debris that has been deliberately thrown overboard by a crew of a ship in distress to lighten a load. There are different salvage rights on these two, but I gave up on my research at this point and moved on to ‘die with your boots on’. We use the term now in reference to one who dies while working. The dream of many a cowboy, or farmer. No rusting out, let me go with my boots on. Research showed the term really originated from frontier towns in the 19th century American West. Another source says that the phrase originally alluded to soldiers who died on active duty.  The Oxford Dictionary of Idioms says: “Die with your boots on was apparently first used in the late 19th century of deaths of cowboys and others in the American West who were killed in gun battles or hanged.” Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang adds that from the late 17th century until the early 19th century the expression meant “to be hanged.”

Hence our next subject of interest was Boot Hill. Again, back in the 19th century it was a common name for the burial ground of gunfighters, or those who ‘died with their boots on.’ 

Those were some of the items under discussion. Not surprising considering that in the car were two scholars, a young person filled with trivia, and an oldster. We were pretty crack on with our assumptions and so my futile attempt to upstage the youngsters, prove them in error on some point, led to my research. The conversation was animated and often jocular. Not a bad way to pass the time driving Manitoba roads after dark!