When I was a traveling man, whenever I got the chance, I ate at the counter of a diner or a truck stop. I liked the counter because you could talk to interesting people and have fun with the waitress. And yes, they were always female SO I’M NOT BEING SEXIST! My favorite counter was at Little America in Cheyenne because their counters were in the shape of a “U” so you could eavesdrop on all sorts of people at one time.

The main thing I learned sittin’ at the counter was, whether it was truckers or carpenters, they all have their own specialized lingo. I think the occupations with the most colorful lingo are cowboys and waitresses. And surprisingly, a lot of times the waitress and the cowboy’s lingo intersect. Both groups call eggs cackleberries, beans bullets, biscuits sinkers, butter axle grease or cow paste, onions skunk eggs and shredded wheat baled hay. So, after the waitress takes your order she might yell to the cook, “Two cackleberries, a sinker with cow paste and some baled hay.” And that was your breakfast in secret code.

Often, food has several names. A sinker or a brick (biscuit) to a waitress might be a doughgod or a hot rock to a cowboy. Both groups also have Son of a Bitch Stew or SOB stew in their vocabulary, although it has different ingredients. For the cowboy, it contains everything but ‘the hair, horns and holler’ consisting of the brains, sweetbreads, etc. from a freshly killed calf. But to the waitress it might just mean bossy in a bowl. (For some reason the cowboy also referred to SOB stew as district attorney.) Cowboys refer to pancakes as splatterdabs while a waitress calls them blowout patches. If it’s a real tall stack of pancakes a waitress calls it a Jayne Mansfield, a curvy actress from my parents’ generation who was really “stacked.”

By sittin’ at the counter for nearly 50 years and having friends in the food business, I picked up on a lot of food slang that was specific to a region. Southwestern cowboys also referred to beans as musical fruit, rib stickers or Mexican strawberries. While cowboys call doughnuts bear sign, to a waitress they are life preservers. Both waitresses and cowboys call coffee belly warmer and in addition cowboys also called it scared water or Arbuckles. If a waitress calls for a shingle with a shimmy and a shake she means buttered toast with jam.

Here are some more euphemisms that I like in the restaurant world: if a waitress tells the cook to “burn the British” what she really wants is a toasted English muffin. Bow-wow refers to a hotdog whereas a frankfurter is called bark, as in woof-woof, and a bloodhound in the hay is a hot dog with sauerkraut. A poached egg is a dead eye while two eggs either poached or scrambled on a piece of toast are called Adam and Eve on a raft. To a waitress ketchup is called hemorrhage, mustard is yellow paint, on the side is in the alley, a well-done burger is a hockey puck and prunes are called looseners.

If a waitress yells at the cook to let it swim, she means add extra sauce and make it cry means to add extra onion. If it’s a to-go order, she says put wheels on it. If a customer wants their eggs scrambled the waitress tells the cook to wreck ‘em. If a patron wants American cheese on their burger the cook is instructed to wax it. And here’s one I really like... if the waitress says to burn one, take it through the garden and pin a rose on it the diner wants a BLT. So much for waitress lingo being used to save time by shortening up an order!

Heart attack on a rack is biscuits and gravy, French fries are frog sticks, spareribs are called First Lady, a cup of Joe is mud, but if you want that with cream and sugar it’s blond with sand. Water is dog soup, moo juice is milk, Noah’s boy is ham, on the hoof is rare, and turn out the lights and cry is liver and onions.

I think a better term would be “YUCK!”