Back in the old days a miner, who had struck it rich, was staying at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver, or so the story goes. Sitting in the lobby, he would spit a string of tobacco juice on the floor. A porter, seeing this, brought a cuspidor only to have the miner continue to spit on the expensive carpet. The porter would move the utensil to another spot each time.

Finally, the miner said to the porter, "Look, sonny, you keep moving that there bowl around and I'm likely to spit in in one of the these times!"