Hoosegow is a fine old American slang term for a jail, still widely known today.  Most people would connect it with the nineteenth-century cowboys of the Wild West.  It’s very likely that they knew the word, but it didn’t start to be written down until the early twentieth century.  The first known example was penned by Harry Fisher, better known as Bud, in one of his early Mutt & Jeff cartoons, of 1908:  “Mutt . . . may be released from the hooze gow.”  The word is from Mexican Spanish juzgao, a jail, which came from juzgado for a tribunal or courtroom.  It shifted to mean a jail because the two were often in the same building (and the path from the one to the other was often swift and certain).  In sense and language origin it’s a relative of calaboose, which is also a prison (from calabozo, a dungeon, via the French of Louisiana).  Hoosegow is now the standard spelling, though in its early days it was written half a dozen different ways.  We link it in our minds with cowboys largely because so much of their lingo was taken from Spanish and then mangled to fit English ideas of the way to say it.  That included buckaroo (Spanish vaquero), bronco (from a word that meant rough or rude), lasso (lazo), lariat (la reata), chaps (chaparreras), hackamore bridles (jáquima), mustang (mesteña), cinch (cincha), as well as the direct borrowings of corral and rodeo.  https://www.alphadictionary.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=4191 

By the early 1300s, according to Oxford English Dictionary citations, the noun “shamble” (schamil in Middle English) referred to “a table or stall for the sale of meat.”  In the 1400s, English speakers began using the word in the plural for a butcher shop or a meat market.  And in the 1500s, the plural was used for a slaughterhouse.  By the late 1500s, Oxford says, the word “shambles” came to mean “a place of carnage or wholesale slaughter; a scene of blood.”  In the early 20th century, according to the OED, the word “shambles” took on its modern sense of “a scene of disorder or devastation; a ruin; a mess.”  The dictionary’s earliest example of this new usage is from Microbe Hunters, a 1926 bestseller by the microbiologist Paul Henry de Kruif:  “Once more his laboratory became a shambles of cluttered flasks and hurrying assistants.”  https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2013/12/shambolic.html

 Butterscotch is a simple mixture of brown sugar and butter.  It can be a hard candy, or a sauce, or a flavor.  The difference between butterscotch and caramel?  Caramel uses white sugar and also includes heavy cream.  posted by Sue  Find recipe for butterscotch pudding  plus links to other old-timey recipes at https://theviewfromgreatisland.com/butterscotch-pudding-recipe/ 

What’s the difference between ignorance and apathy?  I don’t know and I don’t care.

What’s the difference between ignorance, apathy and arrogance?  I don’t know, I don’t care and why should I?

What’s the difference between ignorance, apathy and ambivalence?  I don’t know, I don’t care and I have mixed feelings thinking about it.  

eastering  noun  Eastward movement or drift; the action of turning or moving to the east. https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/eastering  westering  adjective  literary  (especially of the sun) nearing the west.  https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/westering 

Written (alphabetic) s is silent in isle, faille, island, aisle, lisle, Carlisle, and Viscount.   https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=8860&context=gradschool_disstheses 

Pledges from a political candidate:  I will never permit a negative ad against my opponent, I will never ask anyone for a financial contribution, and finally, I promise to make no campaign promises.  *  We accomplish social change by cooperation, not conflict.  *  Nothing is more successful than martyrdom. * The Senator and the Priest, a novel by Andrew M. Greeley 

 “Collar counties” is a term applied to the five counties that surround the centrally located Cook County in the Chicago metropolitan area:  DuPage County, Kane County, Lake County, McHenry County, and Will County.  There is no documentation of the origin of the term, but it probably came into use in the 1960s or 1970s.  It is widely used in urban planning and public policy circles and in the media.  As metropolitan growth begins to extend into counties outside the ring established by collar counties, the term may begin to lose some of its meaning and utility as a descriptor of the metropolitan region.  http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/3.html 

Hundreds of interior design books are published every year, from nitty-gritty how-to guides to lavish volumes that are the publishing world’s answer to lifetime achievement awards.  But they all owe their existence to a pioneering guide that was all the rage in 1897:  The Decoration of Houses, written by Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman Jr.  Wharton, at the time, was a 30-something Manhattan society matron with a keen interest in architecture and interior design, rather than the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist she would become.  Codman was a blue-blooded architect, one year her junior, with whom Wharton and her husband were remodeling a summer place in Newport, Rhode Island.  Poor taste and vulgarity of all kinds reigned in that New England resort town, thanks to an influx of Vanderbilts and other newly moneyed clans anxious to put their lucre to conspicuous use, so much so that Wharton and Codman decided to write a book about how to build and decorate houses with nobility, grace, and timelessness.  Mitchell Owens  https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/edith-wharton-decoration-of-houses-interior-design

 Edith Wharton (born Edith Newbold Jones; 1862–1937) was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer.  Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of the upper class New York "aristocracy" to realistically portray the lives and morals of the Gilded Age.  In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Literature, for her novel The Age of Innocence.  She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1996.  Among her other well known works are the The House of Mirth and the novella Ethan Frome.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Wharton 

in the arms of Morpheus prepositional phrase  (literary, figuratively) Asleep, sleeping.  Synonym:  in Morpheus' arms (obsolete)  (by extension, figuratively)  In a state of being completely forgotten, or of unawareness.  March 19, the Friday before the March equinox, is World Sleep Day in 2021, an event organized by the World Sleep Society to highlight the benefits of healthy sleep and the burden of sleep problems, and to promote the prevention and management of sleep disorders. 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2340  March 19, 2021