The people exploring and populating the North American frontier between about 1780 and about 1840 weren’t just boldly going into the physical wilderness. They were blazing new linguistic trails as well; quite a number of new English words originated around that time and place. Many of them were multisyllabic and somewhat fanciful. A couple of good examples are rambunctious and riproarious. They both mean about the same thing; exuberant or boisterous. Examples of usage from the time suggest that riproarious might have been the more rambunctious of the two:
“If they are rumbunctious at the prospect, they will be riprorious when they get a taste.” (from the Boston Transcript newspaper, Sept 1 1830.)
The frontier was literally, the wild west, and words and usage were as turbulent and unruly (even rambunctious) as everything else. “Rambunctious” also appears as “rumbustious,” “rumbumtious,” and “rambumtious.” Nobody knows exactly where the word (or its variations) came from, but it sounds like it might have originated in the older word “bumptious.”
“Rambunctious” is still in use, as is “ruckus,” which comes from about the same time and place. “Ruckus” is any noisy disturbance, and it might have been imported to North America by Scots carrying the word “rook” (quarrel) with them. Or it might have come from “ruction,” which could be found in some Scottish, Irish, and English dialects. Another possibility is that “ruckus” is a combination of “ruction” and “rumpus,” which is another uproar-related word from the mid-1700s.
Not all the fanciful-sounding words coming out of the frontier began with “r,” but here’s another one that does: rannygazoo. It means a deceptive story or scheme, or even a prank. “Rannygazoo,” which is also recorded as “rannikaboo” and “reinikaboo,” appeared in print somewhat later than “rambunctious,” “riproarious,” and “ruckus,” but it seems to have come from the same general time and place. In the 1890s it became fairly commonly used in newspapers, particularly among journalists in Washington, DC. It could have been a passing fad, or maybe at the time the media was catching on to the deceptive stories and schemes so common to politics. Then “rannygazoo” had another spate of popularity in the 1920s when P.G. Wodehouse began using it in his novels. “I’ll hang around for a while just in case friend Pilbeam starts any rannygazoo.” (Bill the Conqueror, 1924). Wodehouse is the the one who apparently stabilized the spelling as “rannygazoo” — which, you must admit, is probably slightly funnier than “rannikaboo” or “reinikaboo;” Wodehouse was, after all writing humorous novels (by the way, they’re still popular and still funny).
Nobody has a clue where “rannygazoo” came from. Maybe it was made up on the spot when somebody answered “well what kind of a mess have you made here” with “it’s a real rannygazoo, ain’t it?”
———
The title is a quote from Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
