Oh, buoy! A Dialect!

[Elliott A Moreton]

> Precisely.  Or that's my understanding, at least.  Could be baloney, I
> suppose.  Did somebody actually eat it?  Don't know, but I've heard that
> some Soviet archaeologists have dined on mammoth.

In the introduction to _The GULAG Archipelago_, Solzhynitsin, whose name 
I have no idea how to spell, quotes a short news item from a Soviet 
scientific journal circa 1948 about the discovery of a mammoth frozen in 
the ice of northern Siberia.  The paragraph says it was in such excellent 
condition that it was immediately devoured by its discoverers.  To anyone 
who had been in the camps, S. says, the meaning is plain:  The corpse was 
found by a half-starved gang of slave laborers.  Preserving 
paleontological evidence was not the first thing on their minds.

em