Absquatulate (pronounced ab-skwoch-uh-leyt)
To flee; abscond; decamp; run away.
1840: Absquatulate replaced the earlier absquotilate (attested from 1837), both being
facetious coinages of pseudo-Latin: blendings of abscond + squat + perambulate with the middle portion probably influenced by -le (frequentative)
and the dialectal term squattle (depart). The source is contested. It’s said to have been used on the London
stage in the lines of the comical American character Nimrod Wildfire in the
play The Kentuckian as edited by
British author William Bayle Bernard (1807–1875) although there are references
to it being in some editions of James Kirke Paulding’s (1778- 1860; US Secretary
of the Navy 1838-1841) original script. In
an example of the language displacement caused by war (which would become more
prevalent in the twentieth century), the US Civil War slang skedaddle replaced it; other synonyms in
the sense of “quickly to leave” include abscond, decamp and the unfortunately rare vamoose.
Although absquatulate is wholly facetious, all agree the meaning has always been "to flee; abscond; decamp; run away" but the use to which it was put does hint that there was often some suggestion those absquatulating were doing so after stealing something or committing some other crime. The word become sufficiently Latinized for a family of relations to emerge including absquatulation, absquatulated, absquatulater and absquatulative. The latter-day creation abscotchalter was criminal-class slang describing someone hiding from the police; it seems now extinct except as a humorous literary device.
Election aftermath: Crooked Hillary Clinton in blue pantsuit absquatulates, Washington DC, November 2016.
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