Bismarck the "Bismarck stick" is a pun on Bismarck, North Dakota, site of the prison where Ko was incarcerated, and on Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898), a Prussian statesman who unified Germany; he is remembered for his dandified airs as he brandished a swagger stick while he inspected troops.
Okie an insulting nickname applied to midwestern farmers who were ruined in the 1930s by the Dust Bowl. These rural down-and-outers from Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, and surrounding areas packed their families and goods on tenuous antique vehicles and journeyed west to California to search out a better life for their dispossessed families. John Steinbeck immortalized the Joads, a fictional family of Okies bound for California, in The Grapes of Wrath, the source of a 1940 motion picture by the same name, starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad and Jane Darwell as Ma.
Burma-Shave signs a uniquely successful advertising idea utilizing a series of small, unobtrusive roadside advertisements which formed a witty jingle.
Quonset huts a trademark name for drab, prefabricated shelters designed like long loaves of bread.
this is usually just another form of invisibility that is, seeing the female body as a sex object rather than the outer representation of a human individual.
abalone a tasty mollusk similar to scallops.
