Word: calabozo
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Borrowing & Inventing. Hundreds of Americanisms, Mathews found, grew out of other languages. English-speaking settlers in the Spanish Southwest turned estampida into stampede, vamos into vamoose, and calabozo into calaboose. Alaskan settlers corrupted a powerful drink of the Hutsnuwu Indians into hooch, changed hiu muckamuck, the Chinook words meaning "plenty to eat," into a high-muck-a-muck, a "person of importance." From the German gunsmiths of Pennsylvania came rifle, probably out of riffel, the word for groove. The Dutch produced koekje (cookies); and their word for dung-pappekak-eventually turned into poppycock...
Naked children scuttled to cover behind mud huts. Startled vultures lurched up from the roadway. Down the muddy roads of Venezuela's back country roared a ten-ton Fruehauf truck-trailer. Loaded with chilled beef from the Government's new slaughterhouse at inland Calabozo, it was bound on a twelve-hour haul to the meat-hungry markets of Caracas...
Besides Fruehaufs highballing twice daily to Calabozo, Arocha had ten white-painted DC-3s flying chilled beef to the capital from distant llano towns like Ciudad Bolivar, on the Orinoco, and San Fernando de Apure. This week work was expected to start on another slaughterhouse at Barinas. Already caraqueños found llano meat in the markets at 27? a Ib. Last spring they had paid three times as much...
Into this scene of amity rushed a couple of Falangist hotheads. Just back from volunteer service with the Spanish Blue Division on the Russian Front, they ripped the posters from the walls, denounced their countrymen as traitors. Spanish guards handcuffed the two intruders, lugged them to the calabozo...
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