A history lesson

Dear Editor,

In response to Linda Lou, professional bartender, who asked about the Dixie Trail:

The "Dixie Trail" is a colloquialism for any of the various Southern U.S. trails with which we associate despair or destruction.

Sherman's course through the south during the Civil War, for example, could be referred to as a "Dixie Trail" for the physical devastation he left in his wake.

The Trail of Tears, the path by which thousands of Cherokee men, women, and children were forceably removed from their homeland in Georgia on a thousand mile march to Oklahoma, is another southern trail to which the term "Dixie Trial" could quite appropriately be applied. After all, nearly 4,000 of them perished.

One does not, as a general rule, find the term "Dixie Trail" in formal written accounts.

However, it is commonly used by historians in informal contexts, and its application has expanded recently to include any situation where people suffer pain or humiliation as a result of another's careless or thoughtless words or actions.

To put it in more common terms, anyone who causes you to "cry in your beer" could properly be called Dick C. Trail.

Hope this is helpful to you.

Bob Loshbaugh

McCook