As a young boy almost sixty years ago a number of very old men cautioned me not to associate with Arkansawyers, who they claimed had murderous habits of packing around hidden two dollar pistols in their britches.
They’d regale us with stories of Arkansawyers (or nearly Arkansawyers, they were so close to the line) at pie suppers and dances exchanging gunfire with Owl Head revolvers, and sometimes a boy got killed and the slayer would spend as many as ten years in the pen if he didn’t have friends that knew the Governor to pardon or commute his sentence.
I remember asking an old man why the law didn’t hang them instead of only ten years in the pen, and he replied they wuddent at the church nohow, when they got shot.
The old men said after the Great War (or First Great War) the Arkansawyers all got cars and weren’t so dangerous as when they were afoot or on horses.
But it was best not to be around the Arkansawyers, anyhow.
—-
In the
Scientific American magazine (established in 1845) published an article in the December 13, 1879 edition that made reference to
two-dollar pistols (and not in a complimentary fashion either) in an article entitled, “
The Scientific American As An Educator Of The Young.”
The intellectual society which young people enjoy tells upon their moral and mental character not how powerfully than do their social affiliations. The devourer of sensational stories is as little likely to excel in studies requiring patient effort and sobriety of mind, as the habitual reader of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN is to run away with a two-dollar pistol and a brierwood pipe, to hunt buffaloes and slay Indians on the plains.
Whether you mean the weather or someone’s temperament or someone’s physical attributes, these three similar sounding idioms all spring from the same root! Read about it on Idiomation to…
idiomation.wordpress.com