Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: Quanked

 Ah, I'm late with this Slang-o-rama post, although I can hardly blame it on being quanked... more like being unorganized and losing track of what day it is.

"And quanked means... what?" you ask.

Allow me to elucidate (actually, I'll let the references at hand do that).

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According to The Little Book of Lost Words by Joe Gillard, quanked is a 19th-century adjective meaning "exhausted or fatigued from hard work." I don't know if one could count sitting hunched over a keyboard as "hard work." It's not as if I'm digging ditches here! (Well, maybe metaphorical ditches, but that's a different subject.) This word proved pretty elusive on the internet. I did find quanked in Wiktionary, which noted the word was "UK, dialect, obsolete." Wiktionary also provided the reference "Dartnell and Goddard (1893)."

Where there is a reference, there is a path forward, so forward I go...

And sure enough, Google Books promptly offered up quanked in A Glossary of Words Used in the County of Wiltshire, Issues 1-2, by George Edward Dartnell and Edward Hungerford Goddard (1893). Words specific to the county of Wiltshire? I'd say that's pretty specific! And even though I'm deviating from strictly Slang-o-rama here (or maybe not), I just have to share this from the Preface:

The following pages must not be considered as comprising an exhaustive Glossary of our Wiltshire Folk-speech. The field is a wide one, and though much has been accomplished much more still remains to be done. None but those who have themselves attempted such a task know how difficult it is to get together anything remotely approaching a complete list of the dialect words used in a single small parish, to say nothing of a large county, such as ours. Even when the words themselves have been collected, the work is little more than begun. Their range in time and place, their history and etymology, the side-lights thrown on them by allusions in local or general literature, their relation to other English dialects, and a hundred such matters, more or less interesting, have still to be dealt with. However, in spite of many difficulties and hindrances, the results of our five years or more of labour have proved very satisfactory, and we feel fully justified in claiming for this Glossary that it contains the most complete list of Wiltshire words and phrases which has as yet been compiled. More than one-half of the words here noted have never before appeared in any Wiltshire Vocabulary, many of them being now recorded for the first time for any county, while in the case of the remainder much additional information will be found given, as well as numerous examples of actual folk-talk.

Note that the authors spent FIVE YEARS on collecting "folk-speech" from a single county. My mind boggles, and I get quanked just thinking about it...

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.