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Resurrectum
deaconB
744 Posts
(Offline)
1
2015/04/28 - 10:22am

In a comment on the NPR story on "7 Lost American Slang Words", commenter writes

Last year my 101 year old mother complained that she,
"I just didn’t have enough resurectum!."

I asked, "Mother, what is resurectum?"

She replied, :It's when you just can't rise above your rectum!"

I am wondering where this word came from,
Mother was an English major so perhaps it is an old word.

So, resurectum must be the opposite of spizzerinctum.

My mother used to complain of dropsy and heart troublre - you know, when you dropsy down on the davenport, without the heart to get up and go back to doing cooking and cleaning.

The seven?
moll buzzer
Dingus
spizzerinctum
woofy
bazoo
fracture
ginchy
 

Guest
2
2015/04/28 - 2:39pm

I remember dropsy being used seriously for – I think it was – edema, never jokingly. Dingus was fairly common when I was a kid ('50s - '60s); I certainly remember fracture: "That fractured me" was functionally the same as "That cracked me up." I never heard anyone use ginchy conversationally, just Gidget or Annette or someone saying, "It's the ginchiest!" At that young age, whatever it was, I found that it sounded horribly contrived and made my skin crawl.

Guest
3
2015/04/28 - 7:33pm

deaconB: I read that NPR story because I was curious about "bazoo". We still use the slang term "wazoo" (although it seems to be less and less common). A typical usage would be "up the wazoo", from which context you can easily discern the meaning. But I've never heard or read "bazoo" until now.

Unfortunately, the example usage for "bazoo" in the NPR article left me grasping for context ... totally unclear, could mean many things. But I'm guessing it has/had the same meaning as "wazoo" before it became obsolete?

Not even sure it's obsolete or "lost" as NPR describes it. Got 420,000 hits on Google, where the additional meanings of "mouth" and "piece of trash" are found.

Ron Draney
721 Posts
(Offline)
4
2015/04/28 - 10:03pm

My mother (who was mad when she went into labor with me because she'd miss that evening's episode of 77 Sunset Strip, by way of establishing chronological context) said the only slang word growing up that she could never figure out was zorch. I've heard it in a couple of novelty songs by Nervous Norvus, but can't figure out the meaning from those.

Guest
5
2015/04/29 - 9:42pm

See the Urban Dictionary.  I think Nervous Norvus' use of zorch fits number 17

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