Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: Absquatulate!

By special request from reader Liz (and yes, I take requests) I hearby designate the slang-o-rama term of the week to be absquatulate. (Say it five times fast. If you don't know how to pronounce it, check this Cambridge Dictionary link,where you can hear the word in both American and British English... how cool is that!)
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Americanisms, Old and New provides a vigorous definition, as well as noting the alternative spelling, absquotilate:

To run away; to decamp; with the more or less forcible idea of absconding in disgrace. A factitious word of American origin and jocular use, perhaps from Latin ab and American squat. It was first used by Mr. Hackett as Nimrod Wildfire, a Kentucky character in a play called "The Kentuckian," by Bernard, produced in 1833. It is now less often heard than formerly, having been replaced in some degree by the word skedaddle*.

The Online Etymology Dictionary adds a bit more (for instance, giving the full name of the mysterious playwright "Bernard"):

(1837)... [P]erhaps based on a mock-Latin negation of squat (v.) "to settle." Said to have been used on the London stage in in the lines of rough, bragging, comical American character "Nimrod Wildfire" in the play "The Kentuckian" as re-written by British author William B. Bernard, perhaps it was in James K. Paulding's American original, "The Lion of the West." Civil War slang established skedaddle in its place. Related: Absquatulated; absquatulating; absquatulation.

Curious as to when usage peaked for this word (I can't say I've heard anyone say it lately!), I turned to Ngram, which yielded the following graph:

It's interesting to note (well, okay, interesting to me), that the graph of absquatulate has two peaks: one in the early 1860s (which I more or less expected) and another from about 1930 to 1940 (which I did not expect). Why is that, do you think? I'm wondering if that latter bump might tie into the heyday of pulp Westerns. But since I'm not sure when that heyday was, this is just a guess.

World Wide Words also weighs in on the word, with this fascinating insight into the 1830s:

The 1830s — a period of great vigour and expansiveness in the US — was also a decade of inventiveness in language, featuring a fashion for word play, obscure abbreviations, fanciful coinages, and puns. Only a few inventions of that period have survived to our times, such as sockdologer, skedaddle and hornswoggle. Among those that haven’t lasted the distance were blustrification (the action of celebrating boisterously), goshbustified (excessively pleased and gratified), and dumfungled (used up).

Now, I'd better absquatulate. My latest Silver Rush work-in-progress is calling!

Time to mentally absquatulate... See you next week!
Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

*Skedaddle being last week's slang-o-rama entry.