Saturday, April 11, 2009

Found Poem: Dictionary of Americanisms

Posted 07-27-2001 at PFFA.


Found Poem: Dictionary of Americanisms


• BETTERMOST. The best. Used in New England.
The bettermost cow, an expression
we do not find in Shakspeare or Milton.
--Mrs. Kirkland.

• B'HOYS. The New York Commercial Advertiser:
All the b'hoys will vote, aye, more than all.
Let every Whig do his duty.
Another year with a Democratic Mayor--
and such a Mayor as the b'hoys would force upon the city!
Who can tell what the taxes will be?

• BIBLE CHRISTIANS. The Philadelphia Mercury:
"This denomination abstain from all animal food
and spirituous liquors, and live on vegetables and fruits.
They maintain the unity of God, the divinity of Jesus,
and the salvation of man, attainable only by a life of obedience
to the light manifested to his mind and a grateful acknowledgment
of his indebtedness to the great Giver of all.
The congregation numbers about seventy members."

• BIG-BUGS. People of consequence.
These preachers dress like big-bugs,
and go ridin' about on hundred-dollar horses,
a-spungin' poor priest-ridden folks,
and a-eaten chicken-fixens so powerful fast
that chickens has got scarce in these diggins.
--Carlton's New Purchase

• BIG-WIGS. People of consequence.
Demagogues and place-hunters make the people stare
by telling them how big they talked and what great things
they did to the big-wigs to home.
--Sam Slick.
-----
From Dictionary of Americanisms,
by John Russell Bartlett (1848),
p. 31.
-----

A kind of found poem. The challenge: pick a book, open to random page. Use the words on that page, in the order they appear without adding anything, to construct a poem. So, basically, a challenge in selective editing.
Here is the book and page I selected.

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