Page:The Life of the Fields, Jefferies, 1884.djvu/163

149 clothes, tearing a jagged hole in the coat. Country children are always "limming" their clothes to pieces; "limm," or "limb," expresses a ragged tear.

Kecently, fashion set the example of ladies having their hair shorn as short as men. It is quite common to see young ladies, the backs of whose heads are polled, all the glory of hair gone, no plait, no twist, but all cut close and somewhat rough. If a village Californian were to see this he would say, "they got their hair hogged off." "Hogged" means cut off short so as to stand up like bristles. Ponies often have hogs' manes; all the horses in the Grecian sculpture have their manes hogged. In bitter winter weather the servants in the dairies who have much to do with buckets of water, and spend the morning in splashing—for dairies need much of that kind of thing—sometimes find that the drops have frozen as they walk, and discover that their aprons are fringed with "daglets," i.e, icicles. Thatched roofs are always hung with "dag-lets" in frost; thatch holds a certain amount of moisture, as of mist, and this drips during the day and so forms stalactites of ice, often a foot or more in length. "Clout" is a "dictionary word," a knock on the head, but it is pronounced differently here; they say a clue "in the head. Stuttering and stammering each express well-known conditions of speech, but there is another not recognized in dictionary language. If a person has been made a butt of, laughed at, joked, and tormented till he hesitates and fumbles as it were with his words, he is said to be in a state of "hacka." "Hacka" is to have to think a minute before he can say what he wants to.