"Rocky Mountain oysters" and other names for this "delicacy" in the Middle Rockies
Fieldworker: What kind of restaurants would you find [Rocky Mountain oysters] in? Any around here?
Informant: Yeah. Out here at the Outhouse Inn.
Alamosa, Colorado, November 2001
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In my latest post on synonyms of outhouse in the Middle Rockies, I mentioned euphemism as a possible reason for lexical variation. In today's post, the use of language to avoid potentially taboo topics surfaces again in regard to something that some folk regard as a delicacy: animal testicles fried up and served under a variety of names that are not always immediately transparent and, as a result, are sometimes ordered by the unsuspecting (as in the clip from "Funny Farm", above).
If you've seen my blog before, you might have guessed that such names make an appearance in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies (LAMR). And you'd be right. Although not an explicit target of the LAMR worksheets, the pronunciation of oyster was, and since the Middle Rockies are about as landlocked as any area in the United States, one of the more common strategies that fieldworkers adopted to obtain oyster was to go about it by trying to elicit Rocky Mountain oyster. Additionally, since there are a cluster of questions on neutered animals, as well as the process of neutering them, some of these variants naturally occurred during that discourse. Finally, the notion of people cooking certain parts of any animal can be of interest, especially to those of us who were not raised on a farm (or in, say, the Great Depression), so discussion of this topic, as opposed to questions on, say, window shades and dish cloths, could be among the highlights of the interview.
In all, 32 of the 70 LAMR informants provided 42 tokens relating to the concept of Rocky Mountain oysters of 9 different types, presented in the table below:
Fig. 1: Rocky Mountain oyster variants by number of informants who provided them as responses (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)
As illustrated, Rocky mountain oysters was the highest-ranking variant of this item in LAMR, followed by the closely related variants mountain oysters and oysters, and another variant built on the oyster theme, namely prairie oysters, appearing among the hapax legomena (oncers). Another group of variants utilizes fries as its lexical base, namely calf fries, fries, lamb fries, and sheep fries. And then, of course, if you have a prevalence of two patterns, there has to be at least one variant that doesn't fit either of them -- in this case, calf nuts.