mawmsey

[prettygoodword.livejournal.com]

mawmsey (MAWM-see) - adj., tired!stupid, as from drinking or lack of sleep.


When the brain has turned from sharp crystal to something with all the clarity of cotton wool. A time when the mistakes you make really are stupid, instead of the more sophisticated ones you make when you're the ball -- the ones that require concentration. Where making a photocopy involves spilling toner for no reason you can explain afterwards. It's also, though this is not part of the definition, the state where early afternoon seems to last as long as February, at least in my experience. The word is, contrary to all that is good and right in the world, obsolete, except as a character name in George Eliot's Middlemarch:

“People often pretend to tell me things, when they might as well say, 'Mawmsey, you're a fool.'”

Okay, not the best usage example ever, but I am mawmsey myself this morning and a better one is not coming to me. Maybe I'll find one at the bottom of another cup of coffee . . .

---L.

Comments

[hardblue.livejournal.com]

I was thinking this was a great word to own, but I cannot find it to confirm the definition. Where are you getting it from?

[prettygoodword.livejournal.com]

I learned about it from Obsolete Word of the Day (http://obsoleteword.blogspot.com/2008/06/mawmsey.html), who didn't source it. And you're right, there's not much in the way of citations out there -- not even the usual suspects of dialect dictionaries in Google Books. (Though Google is behaving oddly, claiming hits in documents that it then cannot find.)

Hmm.

---L.

[rainbow-yarn.livejournal.com]

A+ word; incorporating this into my vocabulary

[jesuslovesbono.livejournal.com]

reminds me of when my brother used to call our mom "mumsie" when he wanted something from her.