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Snappin' gaggahs

David Stitt explains:

The Herald recently ran a little contest to find out what people thought that woman is doing in the new Irish Famine statue in front of Borders on Washington Street. A friend of mine works in a hardware store where they were having fun showing a picture of the statue to their customers and asking them what they thought she was doing. A local lady took one look at the picture and says 'She's snappin gaggahs!' Nobody had the slightest idea what she was talking about, but were too shy to ask her.

Then a few days ago a dear friend of mine came back to town for the summer. She's a Quinzy native, but lives in Arizona now. She can tell what high school people went to in Boston after listening to them for just a minute. Anyway, we asked her what it meant.

She said it originally meant eating some kind of little fish with your hands. You know. You lift up the fish, open your mouth, and drop it in. But later it came to mean, um, well, someone coughing something up into the air and having that land in someone else's mouth! We still don't know which meaning the lady in the hardware store had in mind.

Kip Francis, a Capie 'airleggah's son (A native Cape Codder and son a of a shell fisherman) fills in the meaning:

A gagga (gagger - a size you gag on) is a very large quahog (thick shelled clam, overgrown littleneck, two steps above a "chowda"). "Snappin' a gagger" is quaffing a really big quahog, the consistency of which, is not unsimilar to um, well ya know.

Comments

I've lived on the South Shoah my whole life, and I've nevah heard of snappin gaggahs used in that context. Snappin is a term used in place of snorting, and a gaggah is a big line of cocaine, named such because apparently the drug drips down the back of yah throat, and a lot of it can make you gag.

Matthew Brooks on October 21, 2004 02:36 AM.

snapping gaggahs is definately used to describe snorting large lines of cocaine....

me on November 28, 2005 07:55 PM.

in Fall River it meant eating hot dogs ie gaggahs usually at Dirty Nicks

sully on March 2, 2006 07:28 PM.

snappin gaggahs has absolutely nothing to do with shellfish and everything to do with doing a huge line of coke. tell your friend to go back to arizona

tonydatts on April 4, 2006 09:59 PM.

It's comes from RI souther MA area were the hot dogs are called weiners or gagg-ers. Their called gaggers cause you eat so many of them...look up RI Phrases. Their also called rockets in woonsocket. Alot of MA stuff gets mixed in with RI and ME phrases.

BMacDaddy on April 20, 2007 10:34 PM.

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