I hope at least some of y’all are familiar with the W.C. Handy song “Yellow Dog Blues”; if not, there are links to a couple of performances at the Mississippi Blues Travellers page Where The Southern Cross The Dog – Moorhead, Mississippi, one of those maniacally detailed investigations of historical/cultural backwaters that so appeal to me. Most of it is about the music, but I’ll quote the part that goes into the etymology of “Yellow Dog”:
The Yazoo Delta RR was nicknamed the “Yellow Dog.” The Ruleville Depot National Historic Register designation says this nickname came about because the Yazoo Delta RR’s s locomotives and rolling stock were constantly covered in yellow dust from the surrounding agricultural areas and because of the trains’ habit of regularly jumping jumping the tracks.
W.C Handy gives a different explanation for the origin of the nickname “Yellow Dog” in Chapter 6 of his autobiography.
In W.C. Handy’s version, a “blistering sun beats down upon a gang of black section hands during the late nineties [note: construction of the the Yazoo Delta Railroad began in 1897]. They are working down in Mississippi, laying the railroad tracks for the Yazoo Delta line between Clarksdale and Yazoo City. Their hammers rise and fall rhythmically as they drive the heavy spikes and sing ‘Dis ole hammer killed John Henry, won’t kill me. Dis ole hammer killed John Henry, won’t kill me.’
A locomotive, following the progress of the men, is steaming idly on the track. The letters ‘Y.D.’ are painted boldy on its coal car. A travelling salesman comes up the embankment, mops the sweat from his face, shifts a chaw of tobacco from one bulging red cheek to the other, and says: ‘Hey, boy. What in tarnation does that Y.D. stand for?’
A Negro straightens up, rubs the kink out of his back and begins to scratch his head in obvious puzzlement. ‘H’m,’ he ventures slowly. ‘Yaller Dawg, I reckon.’
The strangers eyes twinkle. He cackles softly and walks on down the track. ‘Yaller Dawg,’ he repeats under his breath. ‘that’s pretty cute, hanged if it ain’t. Yaller Dawg. Gee whiz, that’s a good one.’ The Yazoo Delta R.R. was christened The Yellow Dog.
The story was circulated and the idea spread until one branch of of the Yazoo Delta was known as the North Dog. For reasons equally suggestive, the fast, direct train from Clarksdale to Greenville was known as the Cannon Ball, while its slow-time, round-about companion between those points was called the Peavine. Negroes had nicknamed all those roads.”
I just wish our old fiend thegrowlingwolf were still around; I’m sure he would have had plenty to say.
I see what you did there with the jumping
jumping the tracks.
Is there a printers’ term for that, for the thread about widows and orphans?
This is one of those terms which I always assumed was more widely used among southerners, or at least southerners of a certain type, whatever that type may be. However, as a northerner, I only ever consciously remember hearing it in the contexts of so-called yellow dog Democrats, a throwback to the Solid South, and Yellow Dog Linux, where I am unsure if the naming is related. I’m told the use in Linux is at least in part contrastingly connected with the name Red Hat for another Linux-related thing, but I’m currently unsure whether there were also other factors involved in choosing that name.
Yellow Dog Linux ran on the old Power PC Macs. I used to run it myself; probably my favourite combination of latop hardware and OS ever. Ah me!
And, says Wikipedia, the name was immortalized in the “high-level” Red Hat package manager, yum (“Yellowdog updater, modified”). I don’t use the Red Hat family of distros myself, so I wouldn’t know.
The political sense of “yellow dog” is attested prior to the establishment of the Y.D. railroad, although not by all that much. I know the “where the Southern cross the Dog” bit because I remember reading the other Handy quote in the linked piece – the one about encountering the itinerant bluesman at the Tutwiler station in 1903 – way back when I was still in my teens, probably in Robert Palmer’s _Deep Blues_. It seems noteworthy-to-maybe-improbable that the “Yellow Dog’ nickname was so well established when the line was only six years old that it could be familiarly clipped, but maybe. The google books corpus does have a hit for “Yellow Dog” as a reference to this specific railroad as early as the Oct. 1, 1906 issue of _The Advance Advocate_, the publication of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brotherhood_of_Maintenance_of_Way_Employes, whose readership were thus all railroad-industry insiders. (And FWIW white industry insiders.)
The opening sentence of Eudora Welty’s _Delta Wedding_ (published 1946, set in 1923) is “The nickname of the train was the Yellow Dog.”
I by coincidence recently learned that the onetime Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway (OW&W) was familiarly known in its part of England as the “Old Worse & Worse,” showing that finding better explanations for railroad-name initialisms is an international pastime.
probably in Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues
I think that may have been where I ran across it.
Old Worse & Worse
Private Eye‘s name for the Daily Express has long been The Daily Getsworse. The Express presumably still has its faithful readers (Sid and Doris Bonkers.)
Sid and Doris Bonkers
“Everybody is normal until you get to know them”
I have some books which incidentally give quite a few of the nicknames for the old British railway companies, but I don’t think I’ll have time to look in them before I go on holiday. Off the top of my head I can only remember ‘Muddle and Get Nowhere’ for the Midland and Great Northern (which didn’t really go to the north, although it went further north than the current Great Northern, which just wanders about East Anglia).
GWR was God’s Wonderful Railway – possibly sarcastically if you just thought it *acted* like it was god – but I think it also had a more uncomplimentary name that I can’t remember.
I once read that Bohemia’s railways, long, long ago, had carriages marked L or P. P was interpreted as pomalu, “slow” in Czech, and L was interpreted as langsam, “slow” in German…
Whatever Private Eye is doing with Getsworse for Express, it’s something else. They would only be doing the thing under discussion if they used a nickname for the Daily Express that was two other (seemingly incongruous) words yielding the same initials. Like if they called it the “David Eddyshaw.”
He was responding to the “Worse” example, not trying to provide another example of the thing under discussion. But you knew that.
Wikipedia reports the existence of a song by Scrapper Blackwell (1903?-1962) titled “Goin’ Where the Monon Crosses the Yellow Dog” which gets points for improbability given that the Monon was an Indiana railroad whose southern terminus (right across the river in Louisville, Ky.) was about 500 miles north of the Yazoo-Delta’s tracks. But Blackwell was one of comparatively few Indianapolis-based bluesmen and was presumably focused on a local audience. Whether that audience treated “Yellow Dog” as a fictive blues cliche or found some local railroad to transfer the nickname to is not clear to me.
It’s got some nice guitar-picking to offset any concerns about geographical imprecision: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk3omI0Ucbo
Perhaps the lyricist is proclaiming that he is bound for an ideal realm, far from this sad sublunar sphere, where the Monon does indeed cross the Yellow Dog.
The Non-Euclidean Blues.
“It’s not that I don’t accept God, you must understand, it’s the world created by Him I don’t and cannot accept. Let me make it plain. I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidian mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened with men — but though all that may come to pass, I don’t accept it. I won’t accept it. Even if parallel lines do meet and I see it myself, I shall see it and say that they’ve met, but still I won’t accept it. That’s what’s at the root of me, Alyosha; that’s my creed.”
How like Ivan, to spurn Riemannian theology thus.
(To say nothing of projective ethics.)
“Slow and Dirty” for the Somerset and Dorset.
Here’s an old web page with a long list of railroad nicknames based on their initials. Most of them are US, I think. The YD is included as Yellow Dog. The actual names are not included but generally googleable. A nice example: JW&NW = “Jesus Wept and No Wonder” (Jamestown, Westfield & North Western). Overall, the list is a good indication that this game was pretty ubiquitous among railroad passengers, workers, and fans.
I recall (perhaps unreliably) that the LNER (London and North Eastern Railway) was known as the Late and Never Early.
Not a railway, but I’m told that my medical colleagues in the RAMC were traduced as “Rob All My Comrades.”
There seem to have been quite a few such forms:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nicknames_of_British_Army_regiments#R
Unsubtle humour, on the whole …
“Know you me, I am a blunt soldier.”
Adjacently, Ford: “Fix Or Repair Daily”.
What name matches up with what stretch of railroad track is not an unchangeable eternal sort of thing. Since the days of the Southern first crossing the Dog, and indeed since W.D. Handy’s death six decades after that, there has been massive consolidation of the railroad industry in the U.S. and there are many many instances of stretches of track that were once entirely separate operations hundreds of miles away from each other now being under common ownership and a common brand name. As of Handy’s death in 1958, the Monon was one of ten or more railroads with their own identities that would over the course of the next three decades merge into the CSX megaconglomerate (with fragments of other parentage subsequently added in the late Nineties), and there was quite a lot of contingency and fortuity in which predecessor names survived and which didn’t, so no doubt there’s an alternate timeline where “Monon” was part of the name of the survivor* and thus more geographically widespread that it once had been, and such a Monon could in principle have crossed the Dog. The current CSX does have trackage in Mississippi but it’s further south — the old L&N route that runs near the Gulf coast in between Mobile and New Orleans. But again that’s a contingent/fortuitous fact. The relevant “Southern” (Southern Ry. of Miss.), FWIW only had that name between 1897 and 1920, prior to which it was the Georgia Pacific** and subsequent to which it was the Columbus & Greenville among other names coming and going. It’s currently operational in part but not (yet) consolidated into one of the current big players
*The “C” in CSX comes indirectly from the Chesapeake & Ohio, the “S” comes indirectly from the Seaboard Air Line, and the “X” comes directly from meaningless corporate marketing.
**One of many railroads whose name suggests greater ambition than was ever fulfilled – it laid tracks all the way from Georgia to the east bank of the Mississippi but never got closer to the Pacific than that. See also the Missouri Pacific, which had the head-start advantage of already beginning on the west bank of the same river but never got closer to the Pacific than Pueblo, Colorado, and the St. Louis – San Francisco (alias the Frisco), which never got further west than the Texas Panhandle.
GSWR – Good and Safe Wee Railway
GWR – God’s Wonderful Railway
Somerset and Dorset – Slow and Dirty
Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton- The Old Worse and Worse
GWR – Great Way Round
– Grub, Water, Rest.
Stratford-on-Avon & Midland Junction – Slow, Mouldy and Jolting
Somerset & Dorset – Swift & Delightful
Manchester Sheffield & Lincolnshire – Money Sunk & Lost.
When it became the Great Central – Gone Completely
London, Chatham & Dover had a reputably poor safety record so – London, Smashem & Turnover
South, Eastern & Chatham – Slow Easy & Comfortable.
LC&DR – Late, Chilly and Draughty
LNER – Late & Never Early Railway
LB&SCR – Ladies Boots & Shoes Cleaned Regularly
L&SWR – Long, Slow & Windy
LMS – ‘ell of a mess
M&GN – Muddle & Go Nowhere
LB&SCR – the Liver, Bacon & Sausage Company
https://www.rmweb.co.uk/topic/166548-nicknames-of-the-railway-companies/
One commenter says “I strongly suspect that some of them are either railway enthusiast confections, or originated in Punch, or similar satire, “
In Vermont, the West River Railroad, which survives as a trail and museum organization, was dubbed “36 miles of trouble” based on the frequency of derailments (because it was narrow-gauge) and breakdowns. It ran from Brattleboro to South Londonderry.
As the link in the OP suggests, you can no longer get to where the Southern once crossed the Dog by train, but it turns out you can get reasonably close. The current route of the one surviving long-distance passenger train between New Orleans and Chicago has a scheduled stop at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwood_station_(Mississippi), about 20 miles east. This is apparently the result of shifting the Memphis-Jackson portion of the route in 1995 to “newer and flatter” tracks; when I last passed through that part of the country by train in ’91 it was on the older alignment further east.
If traveling by automobile (perhaps a vintage Hudson Terraplane?) this is the latitude where U.S. 49 has split into 49E and 49W, running north-south roughly parallel (usually 15-25 miles apart) for about eighty miles. Blues songs referencing “Highway 49” are often regrettably imprecise about which branch they mean.
I once made a point of getting off the London Underground Circle Line at the Tower Hill platform, just to see the location where the original District and Metropolitan lines joined to become the Circle Line. Or maybe it was Aldgate. IIRC, there were still traces of the 1884 rebuilding.
(I got better, I’m not a train nerd now. Not so you’d notice, anyway, but Trond can tell you that I was still tempted by the veteran line that was running through the Jamboree grounds when I met him).
Also “found on road dead”.
Fiat takes the cake, though:
Fix it again, Tony!
Fehler in allen Teilen “flaws in all parts”
für Italiener ausreichende Technik “technology sufficient for Italians”
…and the Latin teacher of course kept saying “may it become a car”.
Note that, unlike Ford, Fiat has the bonus of having in the actual historical world having actually historically originated as an acronym (for Fabricca Italiana Automobili Torino). One wiki article (although not some others) insists on using FIAT in ALLCAPS, presumably for that reason.
Italian newspaper headlines never seem to use all-caps for any acronyms.
The house style of e.g. the N.Y. Times (not an outlier here by U.S. standards) is NATO not Nato but also Fiat not FIAT.
I have heard the auto brand joke a lot more in the German speaking world than in the English. Also popular:
VW = völlig wertlos
BMW = Bayrischer Mistwagen
Ford= Für Opa reicht der