absquatulate

This here word is just as fancy as all get out. Which is right enough, because it’s a fancy way to say “get out.” And by fancy, I mean not fancy fancy, but just fancy is as fancy sounds, ya know?

Here’s the thing: absquatulate came out of the lexical confection shop of the earlier 1800s vogue for hifalutin words like hifalutin and discombobulate and conniption and spondulicks and sockdolager. Lots of syllables, put together in an ostentatious fashion like the multifarious typography emblematic of contemporaneous advertisements. And it has the added whiff of erudition of the fake-Latin formation, sort of like gazebo. Except…

…except it’s made from real Latin. It is fake in that it’s been assembled in English of parts borrowed and variously altered from Latin. But all those parts are actually Latin in origin.

Let’s take it apart. You know that it’s a verb of action or transformation, from the suffix -ate as in contemplate (taken from the adjectival suffix -atus and verbed). You may recognize the -ul- from words like regulate and perambulate; it’s a diminutive suffix that goes onto the root (as in pendulum and calculus) and is often seen just before -ate, so it hopped on for the ride here. The root, in this case, is squat, which may not look like it comes from Latin, but it does – via Old French es- (from ex-) plus quatir ‘press down, flatten’, which comes from Latin coactus, ‘forced together, compressed’. Squat in English eventually gained a noun form and added the sense of a place one might remain briefly (squatting down first literally and later figuratively), i.e., ‘lodgings’. So when you add ab- ‘away from’, you get ab-squat-ul-ate: ‘go away from your little lodgings’. An illegitimate Latin formation perhaps, but you can see the genealogy as clear as day.

But wait: there’s more. Or there could be more. We know that discombobulation has spawned recombobulation, because why not. Well, ab- means ‘away from’, but there are other prefixes that we could take from Latin to indicate other actions relative to one’s squatulus. Here’s a list of perfectly cromulent words that absquatulate implies the existence of:

adsquatulate: to head towards one’s little lodgings (“I’m done for the day, gonna adsquatulate and watch some TV”)
circumsquatulate: to go around one’s little lodgings (“I circumsquatulated trying to find my door keys, which I dropped somewhere”)
consquatulate: to share one’s little lodgings (“Ashley and I were consquatulating”)
desquatulate: to remove (from) little lodgings (“And, as I had not paid my hotel bills, I was desquatulated”)
dissquatulate: to sunder little lodgings (“The tornado utterly dissquatulated us”)
esquatulate: to go out of one’s little lodgings (“I was not going to absquatulate, but I wanted some fresh air, so I esquatulated and sat on the patio”)
insquatulate: to enter one’s little lodgings (“It’s gettin’ kinda cold out on the patio – I’m gonna insquatulate”)
intersquatulate: to go between little lodgings, or from one to another (“It was early Sunday morning and last night’s one-night stands could be seen sheepishly intersquatulating”)
intrasquatulate: to move within one’s little lodgings (“I have no taste for going outside today; I shall merely intrasquatulate, bedroom to kitchen to armchair”)
obsquatulate: to go against or block little lodgings (“The construction on my street is obsquatulating me”)
persquatulate: to go through one’s little lodgings (“I threw the windows open and the breeze persquatulated”)
retrosquatulate: to revert to previous little lodgings (“After I finished university, I retrosquatulated to my parents’ place for a while”)
subsquatulate: to go under one’s little lodgings, or to lodge under something (“Since I turned 18, I’ve been subsquatulating in my parents’ basement, but at least I have a separate entrance”)
supersquatulate: to go above one’s little lodgings, or to lodge above something (“That was back when I was supersquatulating the garage”)
transsquatulate: to go across one’s little lodgings, or to move from one lodging to another (“July 1 is transsquatulation day in Quebec – if you’re moving from on apartment to another, that’s the day you do it”)

Would you look at that: fifteen more words just from that one base. A full house – congratulations! What a lovely Lego kit our language is (with all its purloined parts). I fully expect to see some of these in use. Don’t just intrasquatulate; absquatulate and get to it!