I'm getting the best word requests right now! Absquatulate, another obscurity I've encountered very few times, is a verb meaning "to leave abruptly". Interestingly enough, this word was sort of created as a joke, to be a mockery of all those new Latin formations at the time (that being the year 1840). The central component is a blatantly ironic use of the word squat, which comes from Old French esquatir, with the same meaning. This comes from the prefix es-, meaning "out" (from Latin ex-, from PIE eghs, still "out"), and the root quatir, which traces to Latin cogere, "to compel", from PIE roots to do with motion). The first and last parts are meant to evoke abscond and perambulate, so you would abscond your squat to walk and leave abruptly, as it were. However, the affixes actually present in absquatulate are ab-, meaning "away from", and -ulate, implying an action of movement. So absquatulating means "to move away from squatting".
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AUTHORHello! I'm Adam Aleksic. This year, I graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Government and Linguistics. There, I co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society and wrote a thesis on Serbo-Croatian language policy, magna cum laude. In addition to etymology, I also really enjoy philosophy, trivia, vexillology, geography, board games, conlanging, art history, and law.
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