Thursday word: busticate
Mar. 2nd, 2017 07:50 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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1word1daybusticate (BUS-ti-kayt) - v., to break into pieces.
While you might, quite reasonably, assume this is yet another colorful 19th-century North American coinage, formed along the lines of absquatulate by putting the Latin verbal suffix -icate on the native English bust (which is itself a variant form of burst, which dates back to Old English) -- you would be wrong if you did so. It is, in fact, a colorful early-20th-century North American coinage formed by et cetera: the earliest citation I can find is from 1906 (Eric Partridge dates it to 1915, which shows what he knows). Here's one from 1908:
---L.
While you might, quite reasonably, assume this is yet another colorful 19th-century North American coinage, formed along the lines of absquatulate by putting the Latin verbal suffix -icate on the native English bust (which is itself a variant form of burst, which dates back to Old English) -- you would be wrong if you did so. It is, in fact, a colorful early-20th-century North American coinage formed by et cetera: the earliest citation I can find is from 1906 (Eric Partridge dates it to 1915, which shows what he knows). Here's one from 1908:
We all know that there is nothing so easy to macerate, percolate, absquatulate, and totally busticate as the Ten Commandments.—The Pharmaceutical Era
---L.
