Texas

Tex-Mex began life as a telegraphic abbreviation for a railroad company.

The hyphenated form was shorthand for the Texas-Mexican Railway, whose line was founded in the 1870s, and then a label for Texans of Mexican descent. It only became a name for food in the twentieth century, popularized by writers drawing a line between border cooking and the kitchens of central Mexico.

A curtsy so extreme it takes a state's name and weeks of rehearsal.

The move belongs to Texas debutante balls and traveled with Texan debutantes to the International Debutante Ball in New York, where it became the house style. The hard part is coming back up in a full gown with no hand free for balance.

The Texas legislature voted on where the game was born.

A resolution of the Texas Legislature names Robstown, in the south of the state, as the game's birthplace in the early 1900s, which is as close to documentation as the origin gets. Texan players including Doyle Brunson and Amarillo Slim carried it to Las Vegas in 1967, where it became the tournament game.

Texas lost its size crown in 1959 and kept the adjective anyway.

Texas was by far the largest American state from 1845 until Alaska joined the union in 1959, long enough for its name to become a general unit of bigness. The phrase survived the demotion; Alaska-sized has never caught on.

Oil as a beverage: the joke reached America through a TV theme song.

Texas became a synonym for oil after the Spindletop gusher of 1901 and the fields that followed it. The phrase reached most Americans through the theme to The Beverly Hillbillies in the 1960s, which paired it with black gold.

It exists because a bakery cut the slices too thick for the toaster.

The usual account places it at a Texas restaurant in the 1940s, where oversized slices would not fit the toaster and were buttered and grilled on the flat top instead. The name spread nationally on frozen garlic bread packaging, which is how most people now meet it.

Hunters named the shot after a state, and nobody agrees which joke about the state was meant.

The bullet enters at the rear and is meant to travel forward into the vitals. Hunters generally treat it as a poor choice, because it spoils meat and often wounds rather than kills. The origin of the Texas reference is not settled: one account traces it to south Texas outfitters of the 1970s and 1980s who wanted a polite way of telling clients where to aim, another reads it as a joke about a big state and a big target.

A bottle named for Texas that is sold almost nowhere but Canada.

In Canadian drink vocabulary a mickey is a small flask of 375 ml, so a Texas mickey is the joke version of one: three liters, often sold with a pump or a pouring cradle because it is too heavy to tip. The Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles records it from 1987 and treats it as Canadian throughout. The Texas reference is to the state's reputation for size, not to anything made there.

Texans abroad borrowed the vocabulary of expatriates, as though leaving the state were leaving the country.

The word blends Texas and expat and was in American journalism by 2014, when the New York Times used it for the clientele a Texas brewery hoped to find in Brooklyn. Its mirror image, Mexpat, means a foreigner living in Mexico. The two show the same ending pulling in opposite directions: one names people who left, the other people who arrived.