Word: riverman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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About five hours north of Yosemite is Virginia City, Nev., where Samuel Clemens adopted his nom de plume. The conventional wisdom is that "Mark Twain" comes from the riverman's term for water two fathoms deep. Joe Curtis, owner of Mark Twain's Bookstore, offers an alternative theory. Clemens used to order his whiskey two shots at a time in Virginia City, telling the bartender to put it on his tab: "Mark me for twain [two]." Twain wrote for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise in the early 1860s, chronicling the town's gold- and silver-fueled rise. His recollections...