Tackman

Alice Turner · 20 Apr 2000, 16:41 · from urth-v0028.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: "Alice Turner" <akt at attglobal.net>
Subject: (urth) Tackman
Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 16:41:04
Message-ID: <urth-v0028-0924 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0028/0924.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Just for the hellofit, I looked up "Tackman" in the OED. The definition: On=
e who looks after horses or cattle which are grazed on tack.

I found this very strange. My mother was a horsewoman, and I grew up around=
 horses and riding, and "tack" was/is gear--saddles, bridles, harnesses, ev=
en boots, and it was/is kept in the tackroom. (I rode down in Virginia last=
 spring, and we fed the stable cats in the tackroom.)  My mother's best rid=
ing friend in one place we lived was English, and I'm virtually certain she=
 used "tack" the same way. Both examples the OED gives could equally apply =
to gear, i.e. the tackman could be someone who cleaned and polished the lea=
ther tack. So I looked up the many meanings of tack, and indeed under (way =
under) n.1 one meaning is pasturage. Not till I got to n.7 did I find my me=
aning, and the OED seems to think it's Obs.!! I mention my mother's friend =
because otherwise I would think it's maybe a word that's lived on in the US=
 but died in the UK. Any British horsemen out there to comment? Could the O=
ED be *wrong*??!!=20

The only Babcock in the Encyc. Brit. is "the father of scientific dairying.=
" Hmm, horses and cows.

(And, no, I don't think it signifies anything.)

-alga

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net