Chapter 1 - page 9
jag
"There was that time we had chartered an airplane to complete a jag!"
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Big Book - Bill's Story - page 9
In this sentence the word jag functions as a noun. 2
The slang 'jag' means to go on a drinking spree and become intoxicated.
Bill remembered an event from January 1929, when he traveled from Brooklyn to visit friends in East Dorset. He took a train from New York City to Albany, where he met up with his old friend Ebby Thatcher. Ebby had gotten interested in flying after Charles Lindbergh visited Albany in 1927. After that, the city opened its first airport, Lindbergh Field, and Ebby often spent time there with local pilots. On the night Bill arrived, Ebby took him to a party at a pilot’s house. Later, Ebby dropped Bill off at a hotel and went back to the party, where he kept drinking. During the night, Ebby decided that instead of taking Bill to the train the next morning, he would hire a pilot to fly them to Manchester. The only problem was that Manchester didn’t have a real airport yet—just a rough meadow set aside for future use as an airport. Early the next morning, Ebby brought Bill and the pilot, Ted Burke, to the airport. Once they were in the air, Ebby pulled out a bottle, and the three of them shared it during the 60-mile flight. Someone called ahead from Albany to Manchester to let people know the first plane to ever land in Manchester was coming. A crowd gathered at the meadow, excited to watch. When the plane finally landed on the bumpy field, both Ebby and Bill stumbled out of the cockpit and fell to the ground as the crowd rushed over. 3
Definitions from Webster's 1930 edition. 4
oasis, futility
"His coming was an oasis in this dreary desert of futility."
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Big Book - Bill's Story - page 9
In this sentence the word oasis and futility functions as nouns. 2
Definitions from Webster's 1930 edition. 4
aghast
"I was aghast."
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Big Book - Bill's Story - page 9
In this sentence the word aghast functions as an adjective. 2
Definitions from Webster's 1930 edition. 4
cracked
"So that was it--last summer an alcoholic crackpot; now, I suspected, a little cracked about religion."
1
Big Book - Bill's Story - page 9
In this sentence the word cracked functions as an adjective. 2
In this sentence Bill is thinking how crazy Ebby has acted from his drinking and now Bill is wondering if Ebby is now crazy from his religion.
The slang word crackpot is very similar to the phrase "it won't hold water," which describes a flawed argument, a "cracked pot" represents a person with broken or unstable reasoning.
from the Vocabulary.com dictionary - "Dating from the late 19th century, crackpot combines pot, slang for "head," with crack, implying someone
whose head is cracked. Definitions of crackpot. noun. a whimsically eccentric person. synonyms: crank,
fruitcake, nut, nut case, screwball."5
Definitions from Webster's 1930 edition. 4
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Footnotes for page 9
1Quotes from the Big Book on listed on this page are from the public domain version, in the United States, of the 2nd edition of the book Alcoholics Anonymous. Accessible at 12step.org
2Sentence diagramming, to determine the word usage within the sentence, was performed by CoreNLP at corenlp.run.
3Historical reference taken from "Ebby - The Man Who Sponsored Bill W." by Mel B. (1998) pages 38 - 41.
4Definitions used are from the Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language 1930 Edition. Access to this dictionary online is at Hathitrust.org
5from the Vocabulary.com dictionary