Some of these are great
GABERLUNZIE
A beggar.
A good Scots word this, of the medieval period, though sadly nobody has much idea where it comes from. The first part looks as though it might have something to do with gaberdine, originally a garment worn by a pilgrim. This may well be, because another name for a gaberlunzie in medieval times was bluegown. Taken from the colour of his dress, this was the name in medieval Scotland for a person who was a king’s licensed beggar or beadsman, a person who was paid to pray for the souls of others by telling his beads. (Beadsman comes from the original meaning of bead, a prayer; it was only later that it took on its modern sense through association with the rosary.)
You will find it many times in Scots literature, especially in the old ballad The Gaberlunzie Man and in James Ballantine’s story The Gaberlunzie’s Wallet. But if it’s Scots we’re after, we had best turn to Sir Walter Scott. He doesn’t fail, and here it is in Redgauntlet: “Better say naething about the laird, my man, and tell me instead, what sort of a chap ye are that are sae ready to cleik in with an auld gaberlunzie fiddler?” (Cleik, a version of cleek, from a noun meaning a hook, so to link oneself with somebody.) It’s also in several other of Scott’s books, so he probably must be given the credit of having popularised it to readers outside Scotland.
HORNSWOGGLE
Bamboozle or hoax; cheat or swindle.
“We’re hornswoggled. We’re backed to a standstill. We’re double-crossed to a fare-you-well” bitterly complains a character in Jack London’s The Valley of the Moon of 1913. Seven years later the young P G Wodehouse used it in Little Warrior: “Would she have the generosity to realize that a man ought not to be held accountable for what he says in the moment when he discovers that he has been cheated, deceived, robbed—in a word, hornswoggled?” By then, the word had been in the language with that meaning for more than half a century, and even then it had been around for some decades with an older sense of “embarrass, disconcert or confuse”. People had long since turned it into an exclamation of surprise or amazement: “Well, I’ll be hornswoggled!”
Peter Watts argues in A Dictionary of the Old West that it comes from cowpunching. A steer that has been lassoed around the neck will “hornswoggle”, wag and twist its head around frantically to try to slip free of the rope. A cowboy who lets the animal get away with this is said to have been “hornswoggled”. A nice idea, but nobody seems to have heard of hornswoggle in the cattle sense, and it may be a guess based on horn. Nobody else has much idea either, though it’s often assumed to be one of those highfalutin words like absquatulate and rambunctious that frontier Americans were so fond of creating. It’s sad to have to tag a word as “origin unknown” yet again, but that’s the long and the short of it.
OBNUBILATE
To darken, dim, cloud over, or obscure.
This is as high-flown a Latinate word as the clouds it figuratively evokes (it comes from nubes, a cloud). It’s not a word to be wasted on everyday conversation, but on its rare outings seems to be the special province of the more ponderous political speeches and newspaper editorials.
Nineteenth-century reviewers used it to suggest that a writer had been less than transparently clear in his exposition, as here in a squib in The Princeton review in 1832 about a book by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “There is here fine criticism, classic wit, poetic dreaming, and some grains of sound doctrine, but so obnubilated with the fumes of German metaphysics, that we become giddy, and lose all power of comprehension”. And here it appears as an adjective in a put-down of Walt Whitman in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1860: “Here is the sample of his obnubilate, incoherent, convulsive, flub-drub”. They don’t write criticism like that any more (and they don’t spell that last word that way, either, but as flubdub).
Some modern writers have found it useful to suggest the ponderous wordsmithery of previous generations. Neal Stephenson, for example, in his novel Quicksilver set in the seventeenth century: “This was a wonder all by itself, with its ropewalks—skinny buildings a third of a mile long—windmills grinding lead and boring gun-barrels, a steam-house, perpetually obnubilated, for bending wood, dozens of smoking and clanging smithys including two mighty ones where anchors were made ...”. And Patrick O’Brian had Dr Maturin say it in The Mauritius Command: “It is the pity of the world, Dr McAdam, to see a man of your parts obnubilate his mind with the juice of the grape.”
And these are just a few examples
