… one-time Nixon aide Monica Crowley writes how her old boss wrote to Bill Clinton in 1992 to congratulate him on "a very well-run campaign." However, when three months passed without a reply from the President, Nixon complained, "What do you expect? They're Arkansas dogpatch."
– Human Events, April 26, 2004

Benyamin Cohen, editor of the online publication Jewsweek, went to see The Passion Of The Christ and came out homicidal: "My first comprehensible thought was this: I really want to kill a Jew." Maureen Dowd of The New York Times agreed: "Here, you want to kick in some Jewish and Roman teeth. And since the Romans have melted into history...." But I reckon Dowd and Cohen are faking it. They don't mean that marquee columnists and liberal Jewish New Yorkers will be rampaging around looking for Jews to kill, they mean all those rubes and hicks in Dogpatch who don't know any better will be doing so.
– Mark Steyn, Jerusalem Post, March 2, 2004

Puerto Ricans will cast their ballots for statehood, independence or a continuation of commonwealth status. But don't Americans have the right not to be saddled with an impoverished, crime-ridden island of non-English speakers as our 51st state? … It's hard to imagine a worse candidate for admission to the Union than this Caribbean Dogpatch.
– Don Feder, No Statehood for Caribbean Dogpatch, Boston Herald, Nov. 30, 1998

Hillary Clinton raised the dread specter of a vast anti-Arkansas conspiracy as the hidden factor behind her husband's legal plight. "I think a lot of this is prejudice against our state," the first lady declared. The Dogpatch defense seems bizarre enough to pass the sincerity test. … This is not the first time that Mrs. Clinton has portrayed Arkansas as an unfairly maligned state.
– Walter Shapiro, Hillary's Dogpatch Defense, Slate Magazine, Aug. 11, 1998

They depicted Paula [Jones] as a Dogpatch Madonna who cut lose after a strict religious upbringing … smoking, drinking beer, dancing, and doing other things that were forbidden at home.
– Melinda Beck, Newsweek, May 23, 1994

Jennifer Capriati, for instance, has credited her black Lab-boxer puppy with helping her emerge from her own slough of despond.
– Tom Junod, Sports Illustrated, April 10, 1995

Hardly a book of human worth is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers' back pages.
– Edward Dahlberg (1900-1977), U.S. author, critic; "For Sale," Alms for Oblivion (1964)

Trite terms represent simplications of real and sometimes important concepts that can be very useful, until we forget what it was they were supposed to be useful about. They then become dangerous, empty reifications or are relegated to menial uses and finally buried in the potter's field of pedantry.
– Lawrence B. Slobodkin, Simplicity and Complexity in Games of the Intellect

Ventures into Verse: Being Various Ballads, Ballades, Rondeaux, Triolets, Songs, Quatrains, Odes and Roundelays. Rescued from the Potters' Field of Old Files and Here Given Decent Burial [Peace to their Ashes]
– Title page of H.L. Mencken's first book, 1903 (very rare; 100 copies printed, only 37 survive)

The struggle between the Macedonians and Greeks, for an unprofitable superiority, form one of the bloodiest scenes in history. … we cannot judge that their intestine divisions, and their foreign wars, consumed less than three millions of their inhabitants. What an Aceldama, what a field of blood Sicily has been in ancient times. You will find every page of its history dyed in blood.
– Edmund Burke (private letter)

(US Civil War, 1862): During the ten days I remained at Corinth the town was a perfect aceldama … The wounded were brought in by hundreds. Above 5000 wounded men, demanding instant and constant attendance … A much larger proportion of amputations was performed than would have been necessary if the wounds could have received earlier attention. On account of exposure, many wounds were gangrenous. Where amputation was performed, eight out of ten died.
– William G. Stevenson, quoted in Harold Elk Straubing, In Hospital and Camp

… while carnage was laying its scores of victims around him-we behold him riding from point to point, bringing order out of confusion, and leading away from that aceldama the shattered battalions of the proud army of the morning …
– B.J. Lossing, George Washington's Mount Vernon

One of the most popular stories circulating today has to do with a variously described "death" of the American Dream. All the key words of the pronouncement are fuzzy - What exactly is the American Dream? Just who qualifies as middle class? - but there is a palpable sense that we are living in a barren ruin of a country, a Hooverville from sea to shining sea.
– Nick Gillespie (book review), Reason, Dec. 1996

[Review of the movie "Cinderella Man'] Poverty is an inadequate word to describe the circumstances Americans found themselves in during the period. While Howard does create a sense that it was a very short stroll from Hooverville to Potters Field, he neglects the larger social and economic forces that drove the downturn.
– Duane Dudek, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, June 3, 2005

Howard Dean accused Republicans of never "having done an honest day's work in their lives" [etc.] … Called to the woodshed by Senate leaders when his hate-filled attacks diverted attention from the Democrats' message, Mr. Dean slightly toned down his rhetoric.
– Bill Sammon, The Washington Times, June 22, 2005

… take … "to the woodshed," an old political practice described to me by Jim Rowe, a longtime Washington powerbroker. Jim Rowe had taken Hubert Humphrey to the woodshed at the request of President Lyndon B. Johnson, before LBJ decided on Humphrey as his vice-presidential running mate. When you take someone to the woodshed, Rowe told me, you get him off in a room alone and grill him about his taxes, his health, his girlfriends, his finances, his war record, his debts, his addictions, his innermost secrets.

… Dusko Doder, our cigar-chomping expert on Soviet affair for the last twelve years … we couldn't pull Doder off the [story] on the basis of hearsay testimony from a once and future KGB agent. Ed Williams took Doder to the woodshed, as we had requested, grilling him for almost two hours, and reporting back to me: "Fuck 'em … he's a terrific guy … the charges are horse shit."

quote:

woodshed, n.

2. fig. a. Phr. to take into the woodshed and varr.: to reprimand or punish. N. Amer. Colloq.
From the old tradition of giving a child a spanking in the woodshed, i.e. not in the presence of others.

1907 St. Nicholas July 826/2 He could save himself and most of his companions from unpleasant reckonings in various and sundry woodsheds. 1949 Time 18 Apr. 22/2 If you don't do what we tell you to do we are going to take you out into the woodshed. 1966 Toronto Daily Star 21 Dec. 14 (heading) Taking the Senator to the woodshed. 1983 Chicago Sun-Times 16 July 34 Assuming the Fed is traditionally pliant, why does not Reagan simply take Volcker to the woodshed and tell him to ease up?

c. Mus. Slang. As a place where a musician may, or should, practise in private (see also quot. 1937).

1937 Printers' Ink Monthly May 45/3 Wood shed, a severe rehearsal. 1946 Hollywood Note June 4 T.D. [sc. Tommy Dorsey] goes back to the woodshed. 1977 Rolling Stone 16 June 66/2 Leavell's playing won't scare many jazz pianists into the woodshed.

woodshed, v.

Mus. slang.

trans. and intr. To practise or rehearse, esp. privately (see also quot. 1978).

1936 L. ARMSTRONG Swing that Music 71 We used to practice together, ‘wood-shed’ as we say (from the old-time way of going out into the wood-shed to practice a new song). 1946 MEZZROW & WOLFE Really the Blues viii. 108 I'll have to woodshed this thing awhile so I can get straight with you all. 1950 BLESH & JANIS They all played Ragtime (1958) x. 203, I would hear the tunes and, to make sure, go home and ‘woodshed’ them in every key, put them in major and minor and all the ninth chords. 1968 A. YOUNG in A. Chapman New Black Voices (1972) Drew's got an alto [horn]... Drew dont hardly touch it, he too busy woodsheddin his drums. 1978 Amer. Speech 1975 L. 302 [Jargon of barber-shop singing.] Woodshed, work out the harmony parts (to a known melody) by ear; sing as a group for the first time..; improvise (an interpretation).

Hence woodshedding vbl. n., (a) the dispensing of punishment; (b) the practice or rehearsal of music; (c) spontaneous or improvised barber-shop singing.

1940 Amer. Speech XV. 205 Woodshedding, disciplinary action. 1946 MEZZROW & WOLFE Really the Blues ix. 151 Instead of woodshedding, he went out after the big money with the primitive equipment he had when he started. 1955 SHAPIRO & HENTOFF Hear me talkin' to Ya xi. 190 It was here that the term ‘woodshedding’ originated. When one of the gang wanted to rehearse his part, he would go off into the woods and practice. 1956 S. LONGSTREET Real Jazz xiii. 101 Bix [Beiderbecke] did plenty of woodshedding, playing alone, to some recording on the family Victrola. 1973 T. PYNCHON Gravity's Rainbow I. 129 No head falsetto here but complete, out of the honest breast, a baritone voice brought over years of woodshedding up to this range. 1974 Harmonizer Jan.-Feb. 18/2 Woodshedding is not a ‘spectator sport’ only participants can fully enjoy it. 1976 Times 27 Sept. 12/4 Spontaneous barbershopping is known as woodshedding, because a woodshed is as good a place as any to burst into sudden song.

quote:

d. something nasty in the (also his, etc.) woodshed: a traumatic experience or concealed unpleasantness in a person's history (in allusion to quot. 1932); also in extended use.

[1932 S. GIBBONS Cold Comfort Farm x. 141 When you were very small..you had seen something nasty in the woodshed.] 1959 Sunday Times 5 July 6/6 He enjoyed a temperate childhood: nothing nasty in his woodshed. 1968 B. BAINBRIDGE Another Part of Wood ii. 70 They had all, Joseph, brother Trevor, the younger sister,..come across something nasty in the woodshed, mother or father or both, having it off with someone else. 1992 J. BURCHILL Sex & Sensibility 176 ‘Little people’..always, instinctively, knew that extreme promiscuity..led to heartbreak, confusion and Something Nasty in the Woodshed.

Let the whole instrument be thoroughly ventilated. If there be a nigger in the woodpile, draw him out and show him up. But do not permit a grand measure like this, framed and intended for the benefit of over a million of people, be [sic] thwarted by the machinations of political adversaries or the intrigues of local factionists.
– New York Herald, Feb. 8, 1870, p. 6(?) col. 4

A CHORD OF WOOD
Well, New York, you've made your pile
Of Wood, and, if you like, may smile:
Laugh, if you will, to split your sides,
But in that Wood pile a nigger hides,
With a double face beneath his hood:
Don't hurra till you're out of your Wood.
– Continental Monthly, April 1863

• Are you sure the phrase was 'not uncommon' in 1932? I tried to confirm it, but failed.
• Definitions: I'm finding 'nigger' phrase defined as 'a concealed motive or unexpected factor that adversely affects a situation' (and I'd add that is is a shameful one). There's more, suggesting the phrase is by analogy to a white family lineage containing a black ancestor. [Ugh, these prejudices!] Meanwhile, the 'nasty' phrase means is said to mean 'a shocking or distasteful thing that has been kept secret' (Brewer's Dict. of Modern Phrase and Fable). So the meaning seem similar (though admittedly more varied that just the ones noted here).
• Finally, agreed that Gibbons was unlikely to be a 'sanitiser', but I'm not suggesting that it was she who sanitised. She's the first recorded user of the phrase that we know of, but there surely there were other users before her, at least orally, and one of them may have been more of a sanitiser than she.

quote:

Originally posted by Asa Lovejoy:
... ESPECIALLY with Daisy Mae around!

quote:

Originally posted by wordcrafter July 11, 2005:
Hooverville – a shantytown of temporary homes
[Areas like this, thrown up at the start of the Great Depression, were sardonically named after then-president Herbert Hoover]

since i live here in dogpatch, people think i have a pet possum.
wildflowerchild, July 22, 2002