Shakerag

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See also: shakerag

English

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Etymology

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Probably from shakerag, although some authors propose other etymologies such as the use of rags to cover the nose and mouth during the Spanish flu.

Proper noun

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Shakerag

  1. A common nickname given to a poor rural town.
    • 1882, Benjamin F. McGee, William Ray Jewell, History of the 72d Indiana Volunteer Infantry of the Mounted Lightning Brigade:
      We passed a little place to-day called Shakerag, which reminded us very much of a little town we passed through in Kentucky called Dogwalk.
    • 1883, William Henry Perrin, History of Alexander, Union and Pulaski Counties, Illinois:
      Almost every cross-roads, that had a cabin and a man who could read and write enough to become Postmaster for the monthly pony mail, was at once a New London, Pekin, Liverpool or Shakerag.
    • 1958, Georgia Mineral Newsletter - Volume 11, (Please provide the book title or journal name), page 102:
      it reaches a village that is properly called Sheltonville but which has long been known to the facetious-minded as “Shakerag.” The spot is not the only Shakerag in the state; there are some half-dozen other communities and spots in Georgia with the name, but the first locality mentioned seems to be the only such place that has a road with the same tab.
  2. A nickname sometimes given to the slum area of town in the Southern United States.
    • 1993, Howard A. DeWitt, Elvis: The Sun Years : The Story of Elvis Presley in the Fifties, page 53:
      Shakerag's nondescript shacks were alive with music day and night, a sharp contrast to the dreary, monotonous routines of work-a-day life.
    • 2012, Robert Blade, Tupelo Man: The Life and Times of George McLean, page 150:
      In the fall of 1946, when George was serving as the Chamber of Commerce president, Keirsey hired a new cook, an angular, twenty-six-year-old, Viceroy-smoking woman named Essie Howard, who lived in the black slum Shakerag with her husband, Seaphus, a janitor at the North Mississippi Community Hospital.
    • 2014, Joel Williamson, Elvis Presley: A Southern Life:
      The rundown wooden structure they occupied on Mulberry Alley lay on the eastern edge of town in a mostly black neighborhood called “ShakeRag.”