Some days you just stumble across those website classics and today I’ve followed a great stream of consciousness style tangle of links covering the lowly varmint.
William Safire in the New York Times gives a wonderful introduction to the term:
There’s a gem of dialect out of the Wild West. In hundreds of cowboy movies, the man in the white hat — from William Boyd to John Wayne — scowls at the rustlers and the gunfighters and excoriates them with varmint, the meanest, dirtiest, most lowdown word permitted by the prim self-censorship office then run by Will Hays…
The word had appeared in P. T. Barnum’s 1854 autobiography as an imprecation — “ye young varmint!” … and as the title of a 1910 Western novel by Owen Johnson. It is a dialect form of vermin, rooted in the Latin for “worm,” and encompasses animals of cunning… that cause revulsion or anger in humans.
Why am I so focused on a word that ‘reeks of Western lore filtered through a cowhand haze’? Well today I stumbled across the world of rogue taxidermy and, more precisely, Richard Nadeau’s Custom Squirrels.
Not for me the more exotic oddities of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists - Pygmy Tarsiers and Monkey Faced Piglets. No, I’m into stuffed ‘characters’: military attack squirrels in brightly coloured berets clutching assault rifles with cigarettes dangling from their lips.
Read the full St Louis News interview with this Mitchell, Illinois resident and you’ll be amazed at the industry that’s grown up around mounted varmints on eBay. I know I’d be more than happpy to receive a Texas Hold ‘Em playing cowboy squirrel for Fathers Day:
