It’s The Pitts: Sittin’ at the Counter

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 I 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 I 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, people all have their own specialized lingo, and I think the occupations with the most colorful lingo are cowboys and waitresses. Surprisingly, a lot of times the waitress and the cowboy’s lingo intersect. 

Both groups call eggs cackleberries, beans are bullets, biscuits are sinkers, butter is axle grease or cow paste, onions are skunk eggs and shredded wheat is baled hay. 

So after the waitress takes an order, she might yell to the cook, “Two cackleberries, a sinker with cow paste and some baled hay.” 

And that was breakfast in secret code.

Oftentimes, a single 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 SOB stew in their vocabulary, although this 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 refers to SOB stew as a 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 parent’s 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 specific to a specific region. 

Southwestern cowboys referred to beans as musical fruit, rib stickers or Mexican strawberries, and while cowboys call donuts bear sign, to a waitress they are life preservers. 

Both waitresses and cowboys call coffee belly warmer, and in addition, cowboys also call 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 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 is 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 a person wants it 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!”