Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: Ramfeezled

 Ramfeezled is a perfect accompaniment for last week's asleep at the switch, because one can lead to another soooo easily.

Baffled by ramfeezled? Allow me to elucidate...

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According to The Little Book of Lost Words by Joe Gillard, ramfeezled is an 18th century adjective meaning "exhausted from a hard day of work." Oh yeah. I can relate from here, in the 21st century.

Ramfeezled also shows up on the site Word of the Day, with a note that it is chiefly Scottish, with earliest use in Robert Burns' work.

Ramfeezeled?
Portrait of Juliette Courbet as a Sleeping Child
by Gustave Courbet (1841)
Wikiart.org

But where in Robert Burns' oeuvre does it appear? Let's see what we can find. 

It happens that the first ramfeelzed I bumped into was in a posthumous collection of letters, not from Burns, but from William Cowper (another poet!) in a letter dated 1787. A Medium.com post by Jim Dee tracks ramfeezled in Robert Burns' "Second Epistle to J. Lapriak" (from April 21, 1785) and even includes a link to the poem. The word appears in line 13, in which Burns seems to be talking about his lazy and, well, overworked Muse:

My awkart Muse sair pleads and begs 
I would na write.
The tapetless, ramfeezl’d hizzie, 
She’s saft at best an’ something lazy

The passage includes some other word-ly delights, including hizzie. But I'll save that for another day, because I'm frankly ramfeezled at this point.

The Diva Miss Mia demonstrates ramfeezlement.