let them truckers roll

two days a week i do reception at a nearby hotel, and because the building itself is terribly designed (aesthetically pleasing, but a functional nightmare), my job is essentially to shuffle people from the car park to the reception desk. there are two bellboys who work with me, bringing in peoples' luggage, naturally, and we coordinate with hand-held radios. the housekeeping staff use them as well, keeping it live on channel two, and because i rarely use it, and only keep it clipped to my belt, it's kind of like having a talking butt.

the radios are quite fun to use, as you'd imagine, and my personal call sign is "mother goose," which is a bit cliché, granted, while the bellboys are "chick duck two" and "dark knight," respectively. we're the only ones in the hotel with call signs, but, undiscouraged, we've begun reading up on trucker slang, to make it more authentic.



there's a treasure-trove of information on trucker slang out there, which normally revolves around the "citizen's band radio," which is the radio most of them use in their cabs. turns out cb radios got pretty big in the '70s when they were used, amongst other things, to outwit speed traps set-up to impose the new fifty-five mile-per-hour speed limit.

most trucker slang, for what i've been able to gather, seems to focus on police, other vehicles, and destinations. "bear," for instance, is probably one of the most popular terms, referring to police in general. from this one word comes a great slew of variants - "bear cave" (police station), "bear in the air" (police helicopter), and "bit by a bear" (get a speeding ticket), to name a few. school buses seem to have a wide-range of monikers, as well, like "cheese wagon" and "blinkin winkin" for the normal variety, and "half cheese" for the shorter ones.



"buffalo" is a male prostitute, "breaker" initiates conversation, an "organ donor" is a motorcyclist, and, for some reason, a "pregnant roller skate" is a volkswagen beetle. a "chicken choker," it turns out, is in fact a truck hauling poultry, and not what i originally thought.

besides serving more mundane conversational purposes, trucker slang has also inspired more than its fair share of art and music, a personal favorite of mine being c. w. mccall's 1975 classic, "convoy".



in animated form, the sadly temporal "cb bears" cartoon, produced by hanna-barbera for three months in 1977, followed the adventures of three mystery-solving, truck-driving bears. the show's introduction described itself as a "constant comedy chase," which, while scoring points for alliteration, may have been a bit presumptuous.



film-wise, "the shining," "big trouble in little china," "dazed and confused," "the brady bunch movie," and "transformers" have all featured cb radios, with varying levels of trucker-appropriate slang.

hotel reception work is pretty boring, can't lie to you, but it is made more tolerable by trucker slang. which, in all honesty, goes for most things.

for a thorough-going trucker-slang dictionary, have a look here .