gam
Collective noun used to refer to a group of whales, or rarely also of porpoises; a pod.
Noun
- Collective noun used to refer to a group of whales, or rarely also of porpoises; a pod.
- Upon getting into a "gam" of whales, this boat, together with that of one of the mates, pulled for a single whale that was seen at a distance from the others, and succeeded in getting square up to their victim...
- Breakfast was interrupted as a gam of porpoises surrounded the Argyle, swaying in the foam and singing in gurgles and beeps. - 1985, Dennis Kyte, To the Heart of a Bear: The Last Elegant Bear, →ISBN:
- Christmas day in 1998, we lived on the Pacific Ocean in Pacific Grove, California and watched a gam of whales breaching in the deep ultramarine water. - 2010, Jack White, Mastery of Self Promotion, →ISBN, page 119:
- A social gathering of whalers (whaling ships).
- But what is a Gam? You might wear out your index-finger running up and down the columns of dictionaries, and never find the word, Dr. Johnson never attained to that erudition; Noah Webster’s ark does not hold it....
- There is still that yearning for news from Nantucket that there was when the whale-ships stopped for a gam out in the far-distant Pacific Ocean […] - 1916, Harry B. Turner, “Nantucket's Early Telegraph Service”, in...
- If time was available, whaling prospects poor, and the weather gentle, a gam might last all day and include tea and dinner. - 1997, Gillies Ross, Margaret Penny, This Distant and Unsurveyed Country, →ISBN, page 14:
Origin
Uncertain but surely formed within English; etymons may include game or gammon.
Forms
Noun dated, slang
- A person's leg, especially an attractive woman's leg.
- Make the salesclerk blush by flashing some gam and asking him to mix a bucket in your flesh tone. - 2010, Home Swell Home: Designing Your Dream Pad, →ISBN, page 19:
- The women's-liberation movement of the late sixties and the seventies – the so-called second wave of feminism – introduced Americans to the notion that their mothers and sisters and daughters ought not to be...
Origin
From Italian gamba (“leg”). Doublet of gamb, gamba, jamb, and jambe. Compare gammon and ham.
Forms
Verb
- To pay a social visit on another ship at sea.
- Although most whalemen looked forward to gamming and enjoyed these ocean-borne gatherings, there were at least a few whalemen who either grew weary of them, or just weary of gamming so often with the same ships over and...
- This was early in the summer of 1820, after nearly a year at sea, and they had gammed the whaling ship Aurora, which had on board not only plenty of letters but some newspapers as well. - 2011, Paul Schneider, The...
- In chapter 2 we saw how gamming whalers sang songs that tied them to their homelands while emphasizing the transient, cosmopolitan nature of their work, […] - 2014, James Revell Carr, Hawaiian Music in Motion, →ISBN,...
- To engage in social intercourse anywhere.