Preposterous Words for Perfectly Practical Things

Sometimes you just need to nip out for a nuncheon.

For every word that picks up its lunch pail every day, clocks in to work, and earns its paycheck without a complaint, there’s another word with the same exact job that’s nipping out for a nuncheon or absquatulating on a feriation any time the boss looks away for even a stound. I’d argue that it’s pretty nice to have both kinds of word, but you can judge for yourself. Here are 6 preposterous words for perfectly practical things. 

Sometimes (rather satisfyingly) people are what they do, like Usain Bolt or the Belgian football defender Mark De Man, and sometimes they are what they don’t, like the British police constable Rob Banks. But every now and then, you’ll find someone who is what they say, like a cuckoo, or an argh whelp, which means a cowardly child. 

The word argh is only coincidentally onomatopoeic. It comes to us via the Old English earg, meaning “fearful or wretched,” a word whose descendents also include “Eerie,” which nowadays describes a spooky situation that might make even brave bobbies like Rob Banks feel pretty argh.

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If you are inclined to absquatulate, it’s advisable to do it quickly and in one direction or another—but, with the right amount of confidence, you can absquatulate someone else, as the feckless Mr. Polly promises to do to some imagined dragons in H.G. Wells’s The History of Mr. Polly: 

“And here am I—clad in steel. Well, not exactly, but my fiery war horse is anyhow. Ready to absquatulate all the dragons and rescue you.”

Absquatulate is an old Southern word that appears to have been formed out of abscond, squat (as in “to settle on a property without paying rent”), and a humorous -ulate suffix borrowed from congratulate and perambulate. It first appears in print next to some absolute corkers—including spontinaciously (“of one’s own accord”) and rip-roarious (“boisterous”)—in an unpublished 1830 dictionary called The Cracker Dictionary, which was quoted in various contemporary texts but appears to have since absquatulated somewhere no one can find it. 

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By analogy with the more literal meaning of the word (“someone who shuts their eyes a lot”) a blinkard is “a person who lacks intellectual perception,” and it’s a surprisingly satisfying thing to mutter under one’s breath. You can use it on your commute to work, at home with the family, or (as the 19th century Scottish scholar John Stuart Blackie did) in an oddly specific screed against “atheistic scientists”:

There is a sort of men whose faith is all

In their five fingers, and what fingering brings,

With all beyond of wondrous great and small,

Unnamed, uncounted in their tale of things;

A race of blinkards, who peruse the case

And shell of life, but feel no soul behind, 

And in the marshaled world can find a place

For all things, only not the marshaling Mind. 

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A nice, sturdy old word inherited from Old English that’s particularly useful for parents who are tired of saying “in a minute” to their children. I can tell you from experience that saying “in a stound” isn’t that much more effective when it comes to preventing a 5-year-old from asking for a cookie again before a stound has even really gotten going, but one does feel a certain kinship with Anglo-Saxon parents who doubtless had a very similar experience while their little argh whelps were impatiently waiting for the bread to finish toasting for their Fenkel in Soppes. 

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Borrowed directly from a Latin word that means “to stop work” or “to take a holiday,” feriation had its heyday in the 17th century, but it has a certain merriness to it that feels more apt to describe the singular joy of ditching the blinkards in your office and absquatulating to somewhere warm and beachy than “PTO,” even if that’s what HR insists on calling it. 

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Something as nice as a sneaky afternoon drink (or between-meals snack) deserves a word that can rise to the occasion, and nuncheon is one in a million. A combination of noon and schenche (an Old English word for a cup of liquor) nuncheon actually precedes the more familiar luncheon etymologically speaking—which is as good an excuse as any to do them in precisely that order if you’re having the type of day that calls for it. 

National Duck Out for a Drink Day may have passed us by again this year, but only an argh blinkard would try to stop you if work gets you down and you feel the hero’s call to flip the sign on the shop window from “Open” to “Taking a feriation to absquatulate for a nuncheon. Back in a stound!” Go ahead and treat yourself.