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Also some linguistic interest: "Waddy" is one of the words for cowboy, especially a cowboy who drifted from ranch to ranch and helped out in busy times. Jo Mor
by m0llusk 6y ago
Also some linguistic interest:
"Waddy" is one of the words for cowboy, especially a cowboy who drifted from ranch to ranch and helped out in busy times. Jo Mora and Ramon Adams both suggest that the word derived from wad, something used to fill in, but this notion isn't widely accepted. Neither is the suggestion that it comes from chewing tobacco. To add to the mystery, waddy first meant "rustler", then "cowboy". Also spelled waddie.
Woad (also wad), is a plant grown, mostly in England to make a blue dye consisting primarily of indigotin. It was supplanted by indigo, then later by synthetic dyes. People who worked the woad plantations in the Fens of Holland, Lincolnshire, and Cambridgeshire still call it wad, just as it was pronounced 1000 years ago. People who worked in the woad fields were called waddies, or less frequently woadmen. (From Woad in the Fens by Norman T. Wills) It likely crossed the atlantic with migrant agricultural workers (cowboys).
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- woadwunner 6y agoFun fact, both myself and my step-father were taught by Norman Wills, or Willsy as he was (obviously) nicknamed. A nice guy, he used to get pranked mercilessly by the kids. His classroom was on the top floor of the school's "tower" (actually a glorified office block) and legend has it that one student took a pair of gloves, trapped them under the closed window, then exclaimed that "So and so has just fallen out of the window!". Willsy came screaming over, panicking, only for the whole class to dissolve in laughter. Poor guy, they and we were such a-holes. He never did shut up talking about woad, though.