Category: Word of the Day – S

ETYMOLOGY
from Latin scrībĕre (to write) + -acious

EXAMPLE
“…We have some Letters of Popes, (though not many; for Popes were then not very scribacious, or not so pragmatical; whence to supply that defect, lest Popes should seem not able to write, or to have slept almost 400 years, they have forged divers for them, and those so wise ones, that we who love the memory of those good Popes, disdain to acknowledge them Authours of such idle stuff; we have yet some Letters)…”

From: A Treatise of the Pope’s Supremacy:
to which is added a Discourse Concerning the Unity of the Church
– Isaac Barrow, a1677

ETYMOLOGY
from straddle (with the legs astride)

EXAMPLE
“…If he even seen a straddle-bug start to go anywheres, he would bet you how long it would take him to get wherever he was going to, and if you took him up, he would foller that straddle-bug to Mexico but what he would find out where he was bound for and how long he was on the road. …”

From: The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,
By S. L. Clemens (Mark Twain), 1867

ETYMOLOGY
– dialect form of snivel-nose (a snotty nose)

EXAMPLE
“…How Dem! a Trub? – go, ye rearing, snapping, tedious, cutted Snibblenose!…”

From: An Exmoor Scolding
By Peter Lock, 1782

ETYMOLOGY
– local variant of squeal

EXAMPLE
“…And to ilk bellow, roust, and roar,
He lustily cried out, encore!
Till echo, for ten miles around,
Did the horrid scoil resound…”

From: The Life, Letters and Poems of George Beattie, of Montrose, 1882
John O’ Arnha”. A Tale