Word lists shared by our community of dictionary fans. Sign up now or Log in. Definitions Clear explanations of natural written and spoken English. Click on the arrows to change the translation direction.
Follow us. Choose a dictionary. Clear explanations of natural written and spoken English. Usage explanations of natural written and spoken English. Grammar Thesaurus. Word Lists. Choose your language. My word lists. The definition of a beaver is an water rodent with brown fur, sharp teeth and a flat tail, known for chewing wood and building dams. A native or resident of the American state of Oregon. Of or relating to a beaver or beavers.
Constructed by beavers. A piece of armor attached to a helmet or breastplate to protect the throat or lower face. A village in Ohio. A town in Arkansas. A city in Iowa. A town in Oklahoma. A borough in Pennsylvania. A city in Utah. To work diligently and energetically. Game, set, match! One thing must be noted. The game still has an element of politeness or at least chivalry. A "bearded lady" is not a " Beaver ," and if any one so far forgets himself as to call " Beaver " in such a case he is barred from playing for a month.
And from " Beaver! Locally the game is played mostly by college students and The Atlas warns its male readers not to be frightened or take offense when some one points at him and yells " Beaver. It is argued by the proponents of the pastime that it increases the player's powers of observation and teaches him to keep his eyes open.
Whether this is true or not is not known but no one will deny that it is a very entertaining amusement and local fans are waiting to see if the game which is gaining a foothold nationally, will become popular in Monmouth. A pro-beard backlash against the game of "Beaver" is noticeable in the pages of the [Adelaide, South Australia] Register December 22, and a counter-backlash in the pages of the [Gawler, South Australia] Bunyip December 29, After a couple of additional incidents reported in South Australia—in the [Adelaide] Chronicle of March 3, , and in the [Adelaide] Register again of March 27, , the Elephind matches for "out beaver" very nearly stop.
Beards are not what they were. A leading hairdresser in Adelaide said so today. In company with everything else in the world they are slipping back. Even the country folk, formerly their chief supporters and advocates, have rejected them.
A look round the leading saloons revealed smiling, beardless countrymen waiting their turns to be shaved. It looks as though the small boy of the future is to be robbed of the privilege of cheekily yelling " Beaver. But memory of the fad was very much alive in the fateful year of Depressed by the lassitude of a pitifully short vacation and the damp heat of this scantily ventilated room, members just spread themselves out and breathed heavily.
You might have heard that muted, pianissimo hiss before you entered the gallery, and you might have thought, listening for a moment, that everyone was conspiring together for some frightful purpose: planning to call out " Beaver! But they weren't conspiring, or thinking, or caring at all about anything, apparently, But to test the question, can we not invent a game like that of " beaver ," so much in vogue among English gamins a few years ago?
Instead of calling out " Beaver " whenever we spy a hapless wight with whiskers, let us shout "scaler" whenever detect one of this host of miscreants. What fun it would be to ride our trams then! This is the same year that the limerick about "a young lady named Eva" began to appear in limerick collections. It seems clear that the joke in the limerick is that someone is playing the old "Beaver" game but applying it to the wrong hair on the wrong part of the wrong anatomy.
It is quite astonishing that the "young lady named Eva" limerick's takeoff on the street game of Beaver—a game that seems to have hastened the demise of the beard during the early decades of the twentieth century—has evidently had far more cultural staying power as judged by popular slang than the original game itself.
It's also noteworthy that the first criers of "Beaver! The tables certainly turned soon enough on that front. In colonial times it was thought that prostitutes spread veneral diseases through contact with their pubic area, so the women were made "bald" in that area for health reasons. However, their clients did not like that look and business began to suffer. Therefore, pubic wigs, called merkins, were manufactured for the prostitutes.
These merkins were made out of beaver pelts. Hence the term beaver. Learned this on a historical tour of Philadelphia. It's almost certainly just the hairiness of both. Probably originally more associated with pubic hair anyway, which is why you now find split beaver used at an even lower level. Green's Dictionary of Slang concurs with HaL's answer, and in addition offers a limerick, which it dates from The usage does derive from a word for beard , and the first attested usage appears with the limerick from in Immortalia.
However, digging further revealed usages of beaver as beard that predate other mentioned uses. He proclaims as commonsense fact this tidbit of vocabulary in explanation of his title, " Beavers and Beaverages ":.
Everybody who knows anything at all about beards knows that a bearded man is technically a "beaver," while a beard is, to the expert, a "beaverage. Both terms beaver and beaverage shows up in another magazine The Windsor , Dec.
Though I am not a bearded man, and I don't, of necessity, admire a bearded man, still, picture to yourself a man with a full white beard - in technical language a polar beaver. Figure to yourself this man on a summer day, sweltering in his heavy white cotton-wool beaverage!
How uncomfortable he looks!
0コメント