Need some help with this one, folks:
shidepoke. The only plausible definition google (and from
Urban Dictionary at that) returns is a green-backed heron. A book using the word in the title fits that, but it doesn't fit the context of the book I saw the word in ("Of the Farm" by John Updike, published 1965, well before the UD definitions for "shitpoke" likely developed). Any idea what Updike means?
Thanks for the link! (And I was actually asking what Updike meant by the term, not what his name meant
)
The donkey as the symbol of the Democrats didn't come about until the 1870s with cartoonist Thomas Nast, but this is the first I've heard of them described as birds. The pun shide-Polk for President Polk is clever so maybe it only applied to him, or just for this cartoon.
I still have no clue what Updike meant by it in the passage I quoted, as he used it as an adjective in a nonpolitical context, and 120 years after it was applied to Democrats.
Hey Chris,
So, I stopped in to re-visit the thread and see if another list was warranted (one is forthcoming), but wanted to speak to your question specifically, because it got me curious. So, off to the interwebs I went, and found a reference to the word shidepoke on the heron page on Wikipedia, which sort of confirms the suspicions you found from the Urban dictionary. To further validate that, the Wikipedia page also informed me that the 3rd edition of Webster's dictionary had it listed too, so off to the online Webster's dictionary I went, and while there was not a listing for shidepoke, shitepoke was there, and the derivative spelling was also present. Here are the links, in order:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heron
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heron#cite_note-13
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shitepoke
Now, in the course of this, the term looks to have originated from the tendency of the heron to defecate before taking flight, most specifically, when flushed. With that in mind, I went back to your Updike reference, and tried to shorten the sentence to it's most grammatically simplest form. When doing that, I got this:
And my mother...hurled into the shidepoke sin of adultery and the eternal curse of my children’s fatherlessness.
Given the etymology of the word, and the larger construct of the sentence, the way I read the meaning of this is that the wife in the story had essentially put the first-person on some kind of proverbial pedestal of sorts, where he was the center of attention, and to only be praised. So, the mother, to counter that, called him (the first person) out - or flushed him out for being the kind of guy who had children out of wedlock through his acts of adultery. So, basically, the author was flushed out where he suddenly must come face to face with the reality that he's kind of a shit, and not the greatest thing since sliced-bread, which he may have grown accustomed to.
Again, just my own interpretation of it, so take this with the grain of salt intended for opinions of one who's not even read the novel in its entirity. Just like all else, that's my 2¢ in a world where pennies are meaningless