In this Staff Report–
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mtengallonhat.html
We learn that cowboy hats were worn by Mongols–
And in this article by The Master—
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_016.html
We learn that John Wayne, Cowboy Hero, was an aspiring Mongol—
So, we must conclude that…
It all ties together, somehow! It’s the Illuminati! I just know it! :eek:
New Jersy!? Get a rope.
Lyle Lovett has a great song about cowboy hats, Don’t Touch My Hat, on Road to Ensenada. The chorus goes:
If it’s her you want
I don’t care about that
You can have my girl
But don’t touch my hat
As for messing with a cowboy’s hat, remember what Lyle Lovett says:
“You can have my girl, but don’t touch my hat!”
You know why cowboys wear the sides of their hat brims folded up?
So four of them can fit in the cab of a pickup truck.
Lyle Lovett? What about Chris LeDoux?
You’ll ride a black tornado across a western sky.
Rope an old blue norther and milk it 'till it’s dry.
Bulldog the Mississippi, pin its ears down flat
Long before you take this cowboy’s hat.
[sup]This Cowboy’s Hat[/sup]
Here’s another bit of cowboy hat lore that my dad taught me–never set your hat on a bed. It’s bad luck.
Hey JillGat, great article. I’ve been wondering about the ten gallon hat.
(Let’s try this again, for the third time to get it posted. Sigh!)
Anyway, I had long ago heard a slightly different origin of the ten gallon hat:
Back in the days of the Wild West, when the primary influence down there was mostly Spanish, one of the larger denominations of currency was a gold coin, apparently known as a galleon. Now, if you were well-to-do, you’d go to the best hat maker in the area and purchase his finest (cowboy) hat. Said hat would cost you the sum of ten gold coins, that is, ten galleons, and thus you’d be wearing your ten galleon hat. We then, of course, mispronounced the phrase as ten gallon hat.
(Not to dispute the fine research done by our esteemed researcher, but is this another feasible answer?)
No.
To expand, there was never a denomination of gold coin, used by the Spanish, know as a “galleon” or anything similar.
Yah. A galleon was a ship. You’re thinking of “doubloon”.
I think your derivation of ‘ten-gallon hat’ is wrong. The Spanish have a perfectly good word for the number we call ‘ten’ in English, and a hatband is not ‘galón’ but ‘cinta de sombrero’. ‘Diez cintas de sombrero’ or ‘diez galónes’ somehow changing into ‘ten gallon’? I don’t think so.
‘Galán’: a handsome man, a movie star, a lady’s man, cognate with our old-fashioned noun, gallant: “a man of mettle or spirit; a gay; fashionable man; a young blood”. ‘Tan’ is an adverb that means ‘so’, and is used as an intensifier, as in English. ‘Un mozo tan galán’ could thus be translated ‘such a cool guy’, and he would no doubt wear a cool hat, too.
Read it again. The article CORRECTLY states that galón is the Spanish word for “braid.” As in “braided hatband.”
It’s a far-from-difficult stretch to imagine that white Texans and other English-speaking, sombrero-wearing folk knew what “diez” means, but only a sissy knows what a galón is.
It is a difficult stretch to change braid into braided hatband, however. I know that galón means braid, but a number of problems arise from this derivation:
If gálones are braids, you don’t need a hat with a high crown to hang them on. The brim would serve. Hell, you could hang a hundred braids off the brim of a cowboy hat, and ten would be no problem even for a derby.
If gálones are not braids, they would be called something else, like cintas.
Is there evidence of vaqueros wearing hats with multiple braids or hatbands?
Is there another English word, derived from a foreign phrase, in which the number is translated and the thing enumerated is not? I can’t think of one.
It’s possible that I could think of one, but why? That’s not what happened here–both terms were translated. Diez was translated (correctly) as “ten,” and galónes was translated (incorrectly) as “gallons” (conversely, galónes is not uncommon as a typo for galones (gallons), and vice versa). Incorrect translation happens all the time.
Hang them? You don’t hang braids, you sew them. Indeed, such braids are normally sewn around the brim (and I do in fact believe that the “ten-gallon hat” is characterized by the width of its brim, and not the height of its crown). However, even if sewn around the crown, such a decoration is not a cinta.
I don’t know, and I don’t have the time or the inclination to find out. Is there any evidence that those huge floppy hats were ever called, or thought of, as “tan galán” (or as anything but dorky)?
It might have helped if JillGat had offered some citation for the story she provided.
The American Heritage dictionary says it “might” have happened the way Jill said.
http://www.bartleby.com/61/52/T0105200.html
But it sounds as if she got it from “Webster’s World Encyclopedia 1999” which is summerized on this site…http://www.hatsuk.com/hatsuk/hatsukhtml/bible/glossary.htm
I can’t contribute much at this point as most of my good etymological books are silent on this subject. I can contribute that Mathews cites the term in English first from 1928. But that source is from 1951 and usually subject to much updating.
I’ll try posting this to Dave Wilton’s site and see if he/others can actually provide cites.
As soon as we get a Lighter, Vol. III, we may know more.
Jill’s article also said:
I assume, here, that since you were using pinto beans, and since the cowboy hat is firmly associated with the American west, that you were measuring the hat’s capacity in U.S. dry gallons, rather than in the slightly-smaller U.S. liquid gallons that milk and gasoline are sold in or the slightly-larger British gallons that, um, British liquids are measured in. Before the British went metric, I mean.
I don’t need no steenking cites, hombre.
(But I’ll give em if you insist. I like it better when you guys look it up and prove me right.)
Jill
This all sounds like what John Ciardi used to call “spook etymologies,” like the famous one about “pumpernickel” coming from Napoleon remarking that it was “bon pour Nicole” (Nicole being his horse).
Given the cowboy penchant for exaggeration, I’d say that the orgin of the phrase is just along the lines of, “That’s a big hat! Yup, holds ten gallons.” Or “I want one of them big ten gallon hats like Hoss has.”