Thursday word: busticate

[prettygoodword.livejournal.com]

busticate (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:

We all know that there is nothing so easy to macerate, percolate, absquatulate, and totally busticate as the Ten Commandments.

—The Pharmaceutical Era

---L.

Comments

[realpestilence.livejournal.com]

I wonder if it's related to rusticate or if that's a coincidence. Certainly a fine word, in any case. Makes me think of Mark Twain, for some reason.

[prettygoodword.livejournal.com]

Coincidence of using the same verbal suffix.

It does sound Twainish, yeah.