| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000. |
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| absquatulate |
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| SYLLABICATION: | ab·squat·u·late |
| PRONUNCIATION: |   b-skw ch  -l t |
| INTRANSITIVE VERB: | Inflected forms: ab·squat·u·lat·ed, ab·squat·u·lat·ing, ab·squat·u·lates
Midwestern & Western U.S. 1a. To depart in a hurry; abscond: “Your horse has absquatulated!” (Robert M. Bird). b. To die. 2. To argue. | | ETYMOLOGY: | Mock-Latinate formation, purporting to mean “to go off and squat elsewhere”. | | REGIONAL NOTE: | In the 19th century, the vibrant energy of American English appeared in the use of Latin affixes to create jocular pseudo-Latin “learned” words. There is a precedent for this in the language of Shakespeare, whose plays contain scores of made-up Latinate words. Midwestern and Western U.S. absquatulate has a prefix ab–, “away from,” and a suffix –ate, “to act upon in a specified manner,” affixed to a nonexistent base form –squatul–, probably suggested by squat. Hence the whimsical absquatulate, “to squat away from.” Another such coinage is Northern busticate, which joins bust with –icate by analogy with verbs like medicate. Southern argufy joins argue to a redundant –fy, “to make; cause to become.” Today, these creations have an old-fashioned and rustic flavor curiously at odds with their elegance. They are kept alive in regions of the United States where change is slow. For example, Appalachian speech is characterized by the frequent use of words such as recollect, aggravate, and oblige.
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| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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