Nevada Funeral – Scotty Briggs and the Clergyman by Mark Twain

On this episode

About this episode

Out in the Nevada mining camps of the 1870s, men learned to speak a language all their own, part slang, part swagger, part pure invention, and woe to the outsider who couldn't keep up. When a rough-hewn miner named Scotty Briggs marches into town to fetch a proper burial for a fallen friend, he finds himself face to face with a young, freshly minted clergyman who speaks only the King's English, and neither man has the faintest idea what the other is talking about. What follows is one of Mark Twain's funniest, and strangely most tender, character sketches, a collision of two American dialects, two worlds, and two men who, despite everything, manage to understand each other where it counts.…