Lonesome Dove: Idioms 5 key examples

McMurtry uses a couple of idioms in this passage when he’s describing Lorena’s previous relationships. All of these refer to Lorena as though she were a pet or a beast of burden. She doesn’t share her life with a partner, but “let[s] him keep her.” Other girls don’t marry or get into serious relationships, but get “hitched up” like wagon-pulling ponies. All relationships are arrangements of ownership or support, which reduce a woman’s place to being either claimed by a man or being left behind. It’s all entirely transactional and fundamentally unequal.

The narrator also relies on dialect here to capture the “sound” of Lorena’s thoughts. The informality of the diction when she describes other women as “playing at being respectable” and men as “doing the keeping” mirrors the rough social world Lorena moves through. She has very limited ways to make enough money to survive, and most of them rely on her ability to attract and retain male attention.

Call uses the idiom “set your clock by” to suggest that Deets is generally as reliable as the passage of time. In order to make sure they always have the correct time, people generally only want to set their watches by extremely reliable sources. To Call, Deets is as unfailing in his duties as a very reliable clock. Augustus, however, undercuts Call’s certainty by extending the idiom. His remark about having to “wind your clock two or three times” transforms Call’s expression of confidence in Deets into a silly joke. His comment reframes Deets not as a perfect worker, but as a human being with desires that might outweigh duty if he ran into the right “dark-complexioned lady.” If he’s in the right company, Augustus suggests, Deets is just as likely to be late as any other man.

Here, Gus uses the idiom “cannon fodder” to describe the women and children of the settlers as being completely expendable in the broader efforts of Western expansion. The idiom cannon fodder usually refers to soldiers that army leaders consider expendable. When there’s a dangerous situation where many are expected to die, they are the recruits who would be sent out first to draw the enemy’s fire. It implies that the “fodder’s” leaders see them less as individuals and more as disposable resources in battle. In this scene, Gus frames women and children as material deliberately placed in harm’s way to create outrage. If they are hurt in the process of settlement, the government can justify the next round of land seizure. The idiom strips away the idea that settlement is heroic.

The local dialect in phrases like “chouse the Indians out of the way” and “whip ’em down” also reminds the reader that, despite the sophisticated ideas he’s expressing, Gus talks and thinks in cowboy vernacular. Words like “chouse,” a regional word meaning “to drive out,” and the expression “whip ’em down” to refer to violence against Native people make his descriptions feel direct and harsh. His blunt diction helps the reader see the violence and matter-of-fact cruelty of land settlements that displace Native people.

McMurtry also includes Augustus’s dismissal of “poke salad and turnip greens” as part of this. He says that without the Army, all of the bankers would still be in their hometowns in Georgia eating foods usually consumed by the poor. Gus is implying that without the cycle of settlement and violence he is a part of, the bankers who profit from it would still be poor.

The phrase “in rut” as McMurtry uses it here borrows the language of animal breeding to describe Jake’s sexual appetites. Male animals that are “in rut” are in their mating season, during which they have greatly heightened sexual drive. Males in rut also compete for access to females, which can make them unusually aggressive and single-minded. This matches Call’s view of Jake as a man who lets appetite rule him. He thinks Jake always has these qualities, like an animal who “stays in rut year-round.” The repetition that Call himself is “never visibly in rut” frames his own sexuality as the polar opposite of Jake’s. Call resists any public sign of lust and treats his bodily self-control as a point of pride. Augustus is a sort of middle ground, as he’s neither controlled by sex nor totally averse to it. 

The simile that the narrator uses to describe Augustus’s sexuality shows how Augustus views the potential of sex to reduce men to their animal qualities. He doesn’t want his sexuality to “drive him like a mule” because he refuses to be controlled by his desires. A mule takes orders under a handler and always obeys. Augustus rejects that fate and claims the role of driver, not mule, in his sex life. He enjoys sex, yet he refuses to be controlled by it. When Call says Augustus “enjoyed a root” he’s using a blunt frontier metaphor for sex before observing that the other man can replace sex with whiskey if he needs to. Augustus will take sex when it suits him, yet he will not let the need for it set his pace like it does for Jake.

The idiom “spoiling for battle” means someone is eager and impatient to fight or argue, often looking for the slightest reason to start. It’s been used in American English since the early 19th century to refer to this sort of hunger for conflict, whether the “battle” is emotional or physical. McMurtry uses the idiom to make clear that because he’s annoyed with Lorena, Jake looks for conflict whether or not it’s reasonable. The phrase casts him as a man determined to pick fights with his partner. His anger is less about specific grievances against Lorena and more about a constant need to assert his power over her.

Lorena isn’t interested in Jake’s many efforts to start fights. The second idiom, where McMurtry describes her as being unwilling to “jump every time he whistled,” explains how Lorena sees Jake’s need for control over her. The phrase implies the sort of instant obedience a dog might be expected to show, as if Lorena should treat Jake’s smallest gesture as a command. By refusing to fight with him, Lorena rejects both the role he wants her to play, and the punishments for that which Jake wants to exact on her.