Word: worded
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Dates: during 1880-1889
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THERE has been such a storm of petty complaints on the subject of the bowling-alleys, that a word on the other side may not be out of place. In the first place, as to the "professor in bowling." It is evident to any unprejudiced mind that such a person is a help, not a hindrance. At Yale the men have been clamoring for exactly the same thing that the Echo so strongly protests against. They have had no one to superintend their alleys, and in consequence the balls are cracked and chipped, and the lower end of the alleys...
...author opens with remarks about the word pony. At Cornell the word has a different meaning from that which it bears nearly everywhere else, being used to signify a crib, or other unlawful aid used at examinations or recitations. At Bowdoin a crib is known as a fakir, and at Yale it is a skin. The author - Richard Grant Black is his name - makes one or two unimportant mistakes with regard to the few original slang words in use here. Snab for girls, he tells us, is a Harvard word. He may be right, but I think very few undergraduates...
...only word we have for voluntarily omitting recitation or chapel, has a number of synonyms. At Columbia they prefer to slope, at Michigan University they bolt, and in some of the western "educational institutions" they skate Mr. Black is unable to find derivations for these words. Slope is to be found in Hotten's Slang Dictionary, meaning "to decamp, run off," and is called an Americanism. Cut is found in the same place, meaning "to stop, cease to do anything...
What we call a flunk or a dead, namely, a total failure, is known differently elsewhere as fess (West Point), smash (Wesleyan), and burst (several Southern colleges). The Acta makes a mistake in not noticing the fact that our word mucker applies only to persons not in college. The collegiate rowdy is known as a scrub, which I think is another word originated here, though undoubtedly drawn from English sources. At Columbia a scrub is dubbed a ploot, a prune, or a plum. At Yale a peculiarly suggestive phrase, slum, is general...
...have been unable to find this word in any of the Williams Athenaeum's utterances, but Hall credits that college with it in "College Words...