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Culture  /  Etymology

The Lost Language of American Loggers

A 1942 glossary documents the origins of terms like "punk," "haywire," and "skidroad."
Wikimedia Commons

Remember Paul Bunyan and his big, blue ox? The giant frontier logger may be a vaguely-recalled legend today, but in the mid-twentieth century, he was a symbol of a disappearing, iconically American way of life. In 1942, writer Elrick B. Davis collected a glossary of terms tied to the old logging tradition.

At the time he was writing, the lumber industry had begun to see American forests as giant tree farms. Loggers used trucks and tractors to bring in the harvest, and treated the job like any other, living in towns near forested areas with their wives and children.

But Davis delights in the earlier tradition of lumberjacks who spent most of their time in logging camps far from civilization, creating “a vocabulary so pithy and colorful that its memory stays alive in loggers’ sentimental hearts.” Although, as it turns out, much of that vocabulary didn’t make it into Davis’s account since “most of the loggers’ lingo has been, through the years, semantically too high-test for print even in a scientific journal.”

One word that did jump into mainstream use was “haywire,” “in the sense of broken, substitute, esatz, jerry-fashioned, flimsy, crazy, idiotic, or anything else so contemptible that no other word can be found that is strong enough to serve.”