Alright, degenerate reader, gather ’round the flickering fire of Uncle Jayson’s laptop screen.  It’s time to inject a little polysyllabic venom into your otherwise monosyllabic grunts of existence.  Today’s lexical champion, a real pearl of a word that sounds like something a Victorian butler would shout before cannonballing into a vat of gin, as absquatulate.

Let’s dissect this beautiful beast.

Absquatulate (v.): To leave somewhere abruptly.  To depart without ceremony.  To vamoose, skedaddle, bolt, or in less delicate terms, to fuck off post haste.

It’s a magnificent American-made mutt from the 1830s, likely a jocular mashup of abscond, squat, and perambulate.  It’s a word that wears a top hat while giving you The Finger.  It’s got that pseudo-Latin flair that makes you sound smarter than you are, which is the whole point of this goddamn exercise, isn’t it?

Now, for a practical application.  A demonstration from the field.  We go back to the previous century, when I was first getting to know Boochie.

The bachelor party for one Teddy “The T-Bone” Bonesteel had achieved a state of what can only be described as high-entropy depravity.  We were someplace awful, in the swampy, palmetto-choked hinterlands of Coastal Georgia, the air so thick with humidity and the thrumming of insect wings you could practically chew it.  The groom-to-be, a man whose primary virtues were his impossibly square jaw and his ability to metabolize truly heroic quantities of bourbon, was duct-taped to a lawn chair, his face a Jackson Pollock of Sharpie-drawn phalluses.  The rest of us, a motley crew of shambling, sweat-drenched apostles of bad decisions, were orbiting a chipped Formica table.

Upon this table sat the last bastion of our collective will to continue: a small, tragically finite mound of premium Bolivian marching powder.  It represented the final push, the summit of Everest, the one last charge against the encroaching dawn and the brutal hangover it promised. 

And then there was Boochie.

Boochie – real name Aloysius, a fact he guarded with the ferocity of a mother bear defending a cub made of secrets and shame – was Teddy’s second cousin.  He was a young man whose entire personality seemed to be a composite sketch of other, more interesting people’s vices.  He had the nervous energy of a cornered ferret and the kind of darting, avaricious eyes that suggested he was perpetually calculating the resale value of your dental fillings.  All night he’d been hovering near the supply line, a hyena circling a wounded wildebeest, making these weird, wet, smacking sounds with his lips. 

The best man, a slab of a human named Dirk, had just finished a long, rambling, and anatomically improbable story about a girl he met in Phuket.  A momentary lull descended.  In this sacred pause, where the only sounds were the buzz of a dying fluorescent light and Teddy’s rhythmic, bourbon-soaked snores, Boochie made his move.  It was a blur of frantic, graceless motion – a symphony of pure, uncut scumbaggery.  With the desperate speed of a man snatching the last life raft off the Titanic, he palmed the entire remaining pile of cocaine, scraped it into a crumpled Waffle House napkin he produced from God-knows-where, and, without a word, a glance, or even the slightest hint of a goodbye, proceeded to absquatulate through the screen door and into the shrieking, insect-filled darkness of the Georgia night. 

We just sat there for a second, stunned into a rare and profound silence, processing the sheer, unmitigated ballsiness of the act.  Then Dirk, slow and deliberate, stood up, walked to the door, and bellowed into the void, “YOU ARE NO LONGER WELCOME AT THE WEDDING, BOOCHIE, YOU COWARDLY NOSE-RAVAGING FUCK!”

The echo died.  The cocaine was gone.  The party was, for all intents and purposes, over.  All that remained was the humidity, the hangover, and the indelible memory of a perfect word made flesh. 

N.P.: “The Revolution Is Here” – Thomas Vent