Stewart Hall Holbrook

“ They take the worker's mind off the class struggle. A dehorn committee is one which, during a wobbly strike, pickets bootleg-joints and proletarian seraglios, keeps workmen away therefrom, and thus, in theory at least, prevents members from throwing themselves too quickly upon the strike fund.
A gyppo is anyone who works by the piece, or by any sort of contract whereby volume of production and not time of labor is considered. ”

“ Carrying a balloon is wob talk for carrying a bed-roll or blankets. Since the installation of company bedding at most camps in the West, carrying a balloon has been considered very bad form. Bunyan camps, so named in memory of a pioneer if mythical logger, are those at which bedding is not furnished. The term is also applied to camps in which living conditions are not up to the wobbly standard. These are often known as haywire outfits. When a worker is obliged to carry his lunch in a bucket, it is known as a nosebag show. ”

“ The Industrial Worker, wobbly organ of the imminent revolution of the proletariat, has for its columnist one T-Bone Slim, a gentleman I strongly suspect of originating many of the newer wobbly words and phrases. ”

“ A cook, no matter who or where, is a boiler or a sizzler. A plate of hash is a load of culls. Hotcakes are flats. Highball-camps are those where work is speeded up by a superintendent or foremen or by straw- bosses. ”

“ The style of its editors is not cramped by a style-sheet. To successfully hold their jobs they need only "make it hot for the goddam parasites." Like Hearst editors, they must have a cause célèbre on tap at all times. ”

“ Hence, the word boosier is applied to anyone who is incompetent. When a crew of workmen purposely hoosier up on the company, it means what experts in sabotage term a "conscious withdrawal of efficiency." ”

“ A working stiff often gets it into what he thinks is his head that by merely saving what money he can spare from his $3.50 per day, and investing it in Just Some Good Safe stocks, he will some day surely become a Ford or a Rockefeller. ”

“ The gyppo felling and bucking of timber, where workmen are paid by a standard timber scale, is variously known as working by the inch, or working by the mile, or by the bushel. Scissorbills, generally speaking, are workmen who do not accept the wobbly's sociological concepts. ”

“ Wobbly spread from man to man and, by mysterious, unseen jungle news-channels, from camp to camp, until now it is used by all the Western headline writers. WOBS PULL STRIKE AT HARBOR CAMPS and WOB- BLY HALL WRECKED BY POLICE are familiar to every literate resident of the Pacific Coast. ”

“ Hoosier is applied to any man who does not know his job. Its use in this way is said to have had its origin in an advertisement inserted a dozen years ago in Indiana country newspapers, asking for "men to learn the lumber industry in one of the largest lumber manufacturing plants in the world ”