- Today's Word
Rapscallion
[rap-SKAL-yun]
Definition
- (noun) A mischievous or unruly person, typically referring to someone who is playfully naughty or engages in minor wrongdoing. It’s often used affectionately to describe a rascal or a person with a roguish charm.
Example
Despite his tendency to cause trouble, the little rapscallion’s infectious grin and clever wit made him a favorite among the neighbors.
Fun Fact
The word “rapscallion” is believed to have originated in the late 16th century as an alteration of the earlier term “rascallion,” which itself was a fanciful elaboration of “rascal.” Over time, it has maintained its connotation of mischievous behavior but has generally lost the more serious implications of villainy that it sometimes carried in earlier usage.
(noun) The state of being excessively overweight; an abundance of body fat significantly beyond what is considered healthy.
The Victorian novelist described his villain with pointed corpulence — every detail of the man’s physical excess carefully deployed to signal moral failure to a readership primed to make exactly that connection.
Corpulence derives from the Latin corpulentia, meaning “fleshiness,” rooted in corpus — “body.” The same root gives us corporeal, corpse, incorporate, and corps — a family of words all built around the physical body in its various states. It entered English in the 15th century as a neutral medical descriptor before acquiring the moral weight that Victorian literature in particular loaded onto it, transforming a clinical observation into a character judgment.