>>> Item number 35904 from WRITERS LOG9408D --- (43 records) ----- <<< Date: Fri, 26 Aug 1994 18:35:02 JST Reply-To: WRITERS Sender: WRITERS From: Mike Barker Subject: WOTD: CHAPBOOK Daniel asks (dmurphy@PIONEER.AS.EDU.AU (Daniel Murphy)) - I've been away for a short time, and I see this chapbook word popping - up all over the place. What the hell's a chapbook? 1. A book of chaps--chapped lips, chapped foreheads, and other irritations. Just get your skin in there and chap up! 2. A book for a chap. Somewhat similar to a babybook, wedding album, or other volume used to collect inane snapshots, signatures, and other material for blackmail or other black magic. There's a good chap, and what a chapbook he's got! 3. A book to be carried in your chaps. See, for riding a long ways out in the real West, you tie these loose leggings of leather over your regular pants. Those leggings are called chaps. And, of course, the olde cowpoke out on the lonesome prairie often carried a book or two in his chaps for dealing with those boring traffic jams (have you ever waited for a couple of thousand buffalo to cross?). Keep those doggies rolling, chapbook! 4. A book made from the lower cheeks of pigs, folded and pressed. Usually only a few chaps are bound into one volume, and very few people now know how to check the quality of the bristles, but they are interesting porcine curios until they start smelling. In an emergency, can be deepfried and eaten, except for the ones in blue... 5. a small book of popular tales, ballads, poems or religious tracts, of the kind formerly sold by peddlers. despite the attractions of the former daffinitions, I suspect the last is the real McGuffy. as for why they're all yacking about the peddler's tracts--Michael Heacock is going to put together a printed collection of the 100 word stories. tink