garbage mitt

English

Etymology

A type of mitt once commonly seen worn in cold weather by garbagemen.

Noun

garbage mitt (plural garbage mitts)

1. (Western Canada, especially Manitoba, chiefly in the plural) A thick hide mitten, with thick pile lining.
   • 1981, Peter Gzowski, The Game of Our Lives, Surrey, B.C.: Heritage House Publishing, published 2004, page 77:

     Western kids often wore what they called “garbage mitts”—padded for heavy duty by city workers—instead of hockey gloves; Maritimers used their father’s work gauntlets, with heavy leather up the wrists. But the essential rules were the same everywhere: no goal-sucking, no raising, unless whoever’s younger brother was stuck in goal was also foolish enough to wear shin-pads, no long shots, no throwing your stick to stop a breakaway.

   • 2004, Cara Hedley, Twenty Miles, Toronto: Coach House Books, published 2007, page 188:

     She looked like a man, like a miniature version of Buck wearing his old red toque with the ragged pompom, his garbage mitts stained with fish blood, the army green parka.

   • 2005, Jon Paul Fiorentino, “Electrolux”, in Asthmatica, Toronto: Insomniac Press, page 29:

     I would get into the most fabulous fistfights — dropping my garbage mitts and hurling my fluxing body onto another adolescent, and we would roll around in the freshly plower street tasting salt and each other’s fists.