Word of the Day!

skedaddle[ski-dad-l]

verb:
run away hurriedly, flee, scram

Examples:

Scram. Skedaddle. Beat it. Scat. Take a powder. Vamoose. Go jump in the lake. And don’t let the door hit you in the buttocks on the way out. (Robert Galviun, 2020's the most 2020-est year ever, Mail Tribune, October 2020)

But the rest of the Solar System will be long gone by then. According to new simulations, it will take just 100 billion years for any remaining planets to skedaddle off across the galaxy, leaving the dying Sun far behind. (Michelle Starr, Our Solar System Is Going to Totally Disintegrate Sooner Than We Thought , ScienceAlert, November 2020)

Let him plant his light and airy form onto the Long Bridge, make faces at the hirelin' foe, and they'll skedaddle! (Charles Farrar Browne, The Complete Works of Artemus Ward)

Origin:

This archetypal American expression - meaning to run away, scram, leave in a hurry or escape - has led etymologists a pretty dance in trying to work out where it comes from.

What we do know for certain is that it suddenly appears at the beginning of the Civil War. Out of the blue, it became fashionable in 1862, with lots of examples appearing in American newspapers and books. The focus of all the early examples is the War; without doubt it started out as military slang with the meaning of fleeing the battlefield or retreating hurriedly. Its first appearance in print, in the New York Tribune of 10 August 1861, made this clear: "No sooner did the traitors discover their approach than they 'skiddaddled', (a phrase the Union boys up here apply to the good use the seceshers make of their legs in time of danger)."

A satirical musical item from 1862 in which the pseudonymous author is using the newly fashionable slang term to point his message. The last lines of the lyric are "He who fights and runs away, / May live to run another day."

However, it quickly moved into civilian circles with the broader sense of leaving in a hurry. It crossed the Atlantic astonishingly quickly, being recorded in the Illustrated London News in 1862 and then being put in the mouth of a young lady character by Anthony Trollope in his novel The Last Chronicle of Barset in 1867: "'Mamma, Major Grantly has skedaddled.' 'Oh, Lily, what a word!'"

So far so good. Where it comes from is almost totally obscure. Was it Greek, as John Hotten argued in his Dictionary of Modern Slang in 1874, from skedannumi, to "retire tumultuously", perhaps "set afloat by some Harvard professor"? It sounds plausible, but probably not. The English Dialect Dictionary, compiled at the end of the nineteenth century, argues that it's from a Scottish or Northern English dialect word meaning to spill or scatter, in particular to spill milk. This may be from Scots skiddle, meaning to splash water about or spill. Jonathon Green, in the Cassell Dictionary of Slang, suggests this transferred to the US through "the image of blood and corpses being thus 'spilled and scattered' on the battlefield before the flight of a demoralised army" (World Wide Words)

Probably alteration of British dialect scaddle to run off in a fright, from scaddle, adjective, wild, timid, skittish, from Middle English scathel, skadylle harmful, fierce, wild, of Scandinavian origin; akin to Old Norse skathi harm (Merriam-Webster)

scobberlotcher
noun:
(Archaic, rare) An idle person, one who never works hard

Examples:

Dr. Kettle, when he scolded at the idle young boies of his colledge, he used these names, viz. Turds, Tarrarags (these were the worst sort, rude rakells), Rascal-Jacks, Blindcinques, Scobberlotchers (these did no hurt, were sober, but went idleing about the grove with their hands in their pocketts, and telling the number of the trees there, or so). (John Aubrey, Brief Lives)

“Good-morrow, Master Richard!” hailed the man, in a voice that matched his person. “What! not abroad yet, thou bed-worm, thou scobberlotcher!” and leaning down rolled a snowball in his massive hands, but desisted at the last moment from throwing it at Dick’s window lest it should enter by mistake the adjoining room, where his father and mother slept. (Cecil Day Lewis, Dick Willoughby)

Origin:

The first recorder of this strange word was the antiquarian John Aubrey, who wrote in his Brief Lives about Dr Ralph Kettell, who had been President of Trinity College, Oxford, between 1599 and 1643 ... The Oxford English Dictionary points, tentatively, to two old words as possible antecedents. One is the eastern English regional scopperloit, a time of idleness (perhaps from Dutch leuteren, to idle, the source of English loiter). The other is the verb scoterlope, to wander aimlessly. (World Wide Words)