This weekend, your pal Scanner Colleen did some spring cleaning in preparation for a yard sale next weekend. I boxed up dozens of books for the sale. A book about interjections called Zounds! almost got tossed into the yard sale mix, until I flipped through and my attention was grabbed by an exclamation I'd never heard of before:
"Beaver!"
Scanner Emily especially will be interested to hear what occasion caused the shouting of this word by little children in the early twentieth century...
In the early part of the twentieth century it was popular for children to cry, "Beaver!" when they spotted a man sporting a beard. There was even a game by this name in which youthful players scored points every time they came upon a wooly-faced member of the male species...It is interesting to note that the rise in popularity of this game coincided with a radical decline in the prefrence for facial hair among American men. Whereas beards had been de rigeur through the late 1800s, by the twentieth century moustaches and cleanly shaven faces had become the order of the day--leaving those old-bearded Victorian fossils definitely the odd men out.
Why beaver! and not the more obvious beard? It could be the beard's similarity to the high, sheared-fur hat that was popular in the U.S. at that time. Actually, using the world beaver for beard goes way back to the Middle Ages. There was a soldier's helmet in use in those days wiht a chin-hugging face guard, referred to as the beaver. Shakespeare even references it in Hamlet. The Prince of Denmark asks of Horatio (regarding his father's ghost), "Then saw you not his face?" And Horatio answers, "O, yes, my lord, he wore his beaver up."
Immediately following the entry for "beaver!" is an entry for the exclamation "beer-o!" which sounds equally useful in modern life.
This exclamation was popular in the mid-to-late nineteenth century amon blue-collar laborers with a penchant for razzing their coworkers. Crowed in chorus when one of these pre-hardhats made a mistake...the beer-o! required the klutz for the day to buy his mates a firendly round of beer to make amends...
Yes, that one will be very useful indeed. I think this book deserves closer examination.
Related:
The Beaver Isn't Going Anywhere; Might as well Be Nice to It.
