Traditional cowboy lingo, like the old-time maritime vernacular of the sea, and even the jargon of baseball, is so colorfully descriptive that modern, media-molded English sounds bland and trite by comparison. Often a short, cowboy-styled phrase can convey more meaning and sentiment than several paragraphs of modern writ. That's the heart, soul, and backbone of cowboy poetry. A writer doesn't have to knock his brains out trying to hatch up enough imagery to offset the blandness of modern English, nor does a reader have to scratch his head bald trying to understand the poems. | Cowboy Poetry from a Short-horn Tenderfoot by Richard Bird Baker, Paperback | Indigo Chapters