Noun

Make the salesclerk blush by flashing some gam and asking him to mix a bucket in your flesh tone.

The women's-liberation movement of the late sixties and the seventies – the so-called second wave of feminism – introduced Americans to the notion that their mothers and sisters and daughters ought not to be "objectified": that there was something wrong with reducing female people to boobs, gams , and beaver.

Noun

Upon getting into a "gam " of whales, this boat, together with that of one of the mates, pulled for a single whale that was seen at a distance from the others, and succeeded in getting square up to their victim unperceived.

Breakfast was interrupted as a gam of porpoises surrounded the Argyle , swaying in the foam and singing in gurgles and beeps.

Christmas day in 1998, we lived on the Pacific Ocean in Pacific Grove, California and watched a gam of whales breaching in the deep ultramarine water.

But what is a Gam'? You might wear out your index-finger running up and down the columns of dictionaries, and never find the word, Dr. Johnson never attained to that erudition; Noah Webster’s ark does not hold it. Nevertheless, this same expressive word has now for many years been in constant use among some fifteen thousand true born Yankees. Certainly, it needs a definition, and should be incorporated into the Lexicon. With that view, let me learnedly define it. ' Gam . NOUN—A social meeting of two (or more) Whaleships, generally on a cruising-ground; when, after exchanging hails, they exchange visits by boats’ crews, the two captains remaining, for the time, on board of one ship, and the two chief mates on the other.

There is still that yearning for news from Nantucket that there was when the whale-ships stopped for a gam out in the far-distant Pacific Ocean

If time was available, whaling prospects poor, and the weather gentle, a gam might last all day and include tea and dinner.

Twice each year, the Russian Navy sent out such ships to provision Russian whalers in the Sea of Okhotsk. In sailing toward the supposed Russian ship, the Abigail ’s captain, Ebenezer Nye, was hoping for a gam with the ship's officers

Noun

At some stage some gam of an official decided that Guihen should be translated to the English name Wynne.

Noun

"S'cat! s'cat! — set that cat off that barns knee — it al puzzum it!"

"Ah've tel'd 'em awal abart that tu monny a hunderd times, bud thuh tak no moar gaum o' muh then a stoop."

"Good-night, Uncle Nat," he called. Uncle Nat walked on in grim silence, never turning his head, for quite half a dozen paces. Then he came back to the gate to which Adam had also returned. "Tak' no gaum o' my gruntlin', Addy," asked Uncle.

"Take no gaum ," he said. "I've not heard her. This is between thee and me, Tommy. I'll use but one hand."

Noun

"douse your head under the pump and wash some of the gaum off your hands and we'll see what your Aunt Debbie can do for that empty feelin'."

Said 'Black Bill' Walker, of Walker's Valley, in speaking of the forge: 'I never heerd sech a rackity-rack! Ye'd think the heavens was fallin' down! Them fellers aworkin' thar in the sweat an' gaum reminded me more of the gate to the bad place!'

They thrust their wedge-shaped faces into the light, then, one by one, tried the air with their delicate paper wings. The air bore them up; they circled lazily over the heads of men, they lit on hands and faces and in the gaum of wounds, they died underfoot.

Noun

When he had let what he deemed was a sufficiency of blood out of the incised vein, he called to Elvira to bring a spoon of "sut" from off the back of the fireplace and a "gaum " of spiderwebs from somewhere or other.

The Rockwellian palette was what Arkansans would call a "gaum " of sentiment— sentimentality, the cynical would say. His paintings were what these same cynics would probably call "representational,"

"There aint a gaum of grub to be found nowheres. If rain was syrup, we'd all be gorged, but there aint enough sup to make a housefly floop his snoot."

Noun

I saw standing up out of the grass a murderous length of sharp steel. Some gaum of a farm boy had abandoned this scythe while cutting bundles of sourgrass for cattle-breeding.

I'm no gaum . I'll work th' delivery in such a wise way that neither of the boyos'll fall into the suspicion they had lost as much as a burnt-out match.

He's a scrawny gaum of a lad named Tony Regan, the tailor's eldest son.