Whatever happened to ‘Carrboro fighting’?

When the A Word A Day email service discussed “verbal fighting,” Ed Greer of Philadelphia responded:

“When I was a kid in the 1960s, we did something we called ‘Carrboro fighting’ (Carrboro was the town on the other side of the railroad tracks).

“You faced your opponent placing your right shoulder against his right shoulder, and walked around in circles yelling insults at each other. The loser was the person who either ran out of insults or repeated himself.”

 

Skats: The chain is gone, but there’s still a link

“There is a chain of burger restaurants in North Carolina (and maybe elsewhere) called Skats. I once asked a friend where she was going to have lunch and she replied, ‘I’m going to have a Skatburger.’ I knew she was a nature lover and asked her if she knew what ‘scat’ meant. She said she did but had never put the two together.”

— From Steve Harper’s post on “scatology” in the A Word A Day newsletter (July 4)

Skats was started in Rocky Mount in 1985 to serve towns too small to interest the fast-food giants. In the early ’90s, it was gobbled up by Hardee’s, which converted most stores into Hardee’s Skat-Thrus.