word of the day: bogie

The word of the day is bogie:

Etymology:  A northern dialect word, which has recently been generally diffused in connection with railways as applied to the plate-layer's bogie, but especially in sense 2. Of unknown etymology: notwithstanding absurd stories in the newspapers (invented ad rem ), it has (as the sense might show) nothing to do with bogy n.¹, which is not a northern word. 

 

1. north. dial. A low strong truck upon four small wheels, also called trolly, hurly, etc. ‘A kind of cart with low wheels and long shafts, used by masons to remove large stones’ (Peacock Lonsdale Gloss.); ‘a rude contrivance for moving heavy articles, consisting of a simple plank on low wheels’ ( Lanc. Gloss.). esp. in Newcastle, A strong low truck (about 1 ft. high) on 4 small wheels, used, since c1817, for transporting a single cask or hogshead from the quay to the town; also a flat board with 4 very small wheels on which lads career down steep banks or roads, as in the Canadian sport of tobogganing. Hence, in general use, the low truck used by platelayers on a railway.

2. A low truck or frame running on two or more pairs of wheels and supporting the fore-part of a locomotive engine or the ends of a long railway-carriage, to which it is attached by a central pivot, on which it swivels freely in passing curves; a revolving under-carriage. (OED)

"In those years, we always travelled to the farm in the south by overnight train.  Arriving at the Lahore station by night, in two or three straggling cars, among hissing gas lanterns on venders' carts and the shouts of red-coated porters greasing their way through the crowd with suitcases stacked on their heads, we were bustled into a cream-and-green railway bogie, onto a train that seemed always to begin clanking and rolling just as we boarded, onto the Tezgam, the Khyber Mail, the Karachi Express, so that bedrolls and hampers of food and bottles and leaking thermoses, cases of tinkling silverware and rattling dishes, enormous leather-strapped suitcases would be thrust up into the moving vestibule, and Ghulam Rasool, my father's portly valet, galloping alongside the surging locomotive, would make a last desperate lunge, both feet seemingly in the air and his torso blown sideways in the slipstream, and be triumphantly hauled in by numerous hands."

 - Daniyal Mueenuddin, "Sameer and the samosas: a son, an inheritance, and a battle of wills", 3 December 2012 The New Yorker