Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: Mosey

These days when I go out for a walk, I perambulate through my neighborhood and mostly just mosey around, musing about... well... all kinds of things, including the where, when and why of the word mosey.

Mosey has a nice ring to it. Kind of casual and slow.
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According to Americanisms, Old and New by John Stephen Farmer, to mosey means to depart suddenly and involuntarily; to sneak away. Farmer continues:

This, with some degree of plausibility, is supposed to be a corruption of the Spanish vamose, an elision of the first syllable having occurred and the final vowel being sounded. To mosey is also often used in the primary simple sense of "to go," and to mosey along with any one is also employed idiomatically in the sense of to agree with.

All of this is rather fascinating, although I have to say I've never equated mosey with "sudden (involuntary) departure." The Online Etymological Dictionary puts first use at about 1829 and defines mosey as American English slang meaning "move off or away, get out." 

Even though it states mosey is of unknown origin, the OED can't help but offer a theory or two:

...perhaps related to British dialectal mose about "go around in a dull, stupid way." Or perhaps from some abbreviation of Spanish vamos (see vamoose). Related: Moseyed; moseying.

Well, at least I know that my Silver Rush characters can safely mosey through the 1880s without fear of anachronism. 

For a change of scenery, let's mosey with Seurat for a bit.
A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884) by Georges Seurat - twGyqq52R-lYpA at Google Cultural Institute maximum zoom level, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22319969