Although not an explicit target of the worksheets of the Linguistic Atlas of the Western States, the morpheme loco was used 22 times by informants in 8 of the 70 interviews that make up the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies. In four of these instances (from two interviews), the morpheme loco appears as part of the word locomotive(s), whereby loco came to English as a Latin morpheme meaning "place." In the remainder of the uses, loco clearly carries with it the meaning of "insane", which is attributed to Spanish. Twice (in a single interview conducted in Gardner, Colorado, in 2003) the word is used to describe a local eccentric.

It is the other 16 uses of the morpheme in the corpus that this post is concerned, as it is probably a use with which most people without ranching experience have little or no familiarity. This is the use of the morpheme in the noxious plant locoweed, which was used by four informants, along with variants alkide loco and loco, which were each used by one informant to mean the same as locoweed. The name of the plant, which typically emerged in response to an open-ended question about local flora, or a follow-up question concerning poisonous plants in the area. The name of the plant is closely tied into the effect that it has on livestock, mainly cattle and horses; as the informant from Rock River, Wyoming (interviewed in 1988) reports here:

0612 P: Okay. U(H) What, what term would you use for cattle of poor quality? U(F) Is there any term you would?
0612 R: Oh gosh. What were they? Poor quality that those. The only cattle I can remember that. We called them locoed. There was a weed that they ate and they went completely loco. They'd run into you and butt you butt themselves, their head against the barn or.

0613 P: Really. And those were locoed cattle.
0613 R: They were locoed. G(A)

0614 P: What about sheep? U(F) Anything like that with sheep?
0614 R: Well yes. Death, death camas was U(H) the weed that the sheep would eat that killed them and loco was what the cattle ate that killed them and it was certain times of the year but now I've been, it's been so long since I was involved in that kind of stuff that I can't remember. U(L)

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More evidence on the use of the term can be found in this excerpt from Buena Vista, Colorado (1991):

1094 P: Okay.
1094 R: U(H) Those yellow flowers and U(H) wild sweet peas. Oh iris, johnny jump-ups. Locus or a not locus. What's this other white stuff? U(F) Locoweed.
1094 S: Locoweed.
1094 R: The horses eat and get locoed.

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Thus, locoweed and loco, in general, apparently have some uses in the Western United States that may be lacking elsewhere in the United States, or at least in more urban settings.

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