ramsasspatorious
Feb. 2nd, 2015 07:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
prettygoodwordAnother theme: shrinking Rs. Which is to say, successively smaller words that all begin with R, starting with:
ramsasspatorious (your guess is as good as mine) - adj., excited, anxious, impatient.
We have exactly one source for this: folklorist Louise Pound, who as professor of English at the University of Nebraska submitted to the journal Dialect Notes lists of student slang she had collected between 1911 and 1916, among which included this one. As far as anyone can tell, aside from catching people's attention as an amusing word, no one outside that campus in that period has ever used it seriously. Pity, as it's a fine example of American coinage practices, even if it's from later than the great period of American coinage.
---L.
ramsasspatorious (your guess is as good as mine) - adj., excited, anxious, impatient.
We have exactly one source for this: folklorist Louise Pound, who as professor of English at the University of Nebraska submitted to the journal Dialect Notes lists of student slang she had collected between 1911 and 1916, among which included this one. As far as anyone can tell, aside from catching people's attention as an amusing word, no one outside that campus in that period has ever used it seriously. Pity, as it's a fine example of American coinage practices, even if it's from later than the great period of American coinage.
---L.
