August 25, 2006 - Robustious

Tough one today. Not having searched yet, I might have to resort to a back-up plan already.

robustious \roh-BUHS-chuhs\, adjective:
1. Boisterous; vigorous.
2. Coarse; rough; crude.

. . .the robustious romantic figure comparable to John Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility--he comes in with dash, then proves a temptation to the heroine but is an eventual disappointment.
-- Stanley Kauffmann, "Emma", New Republic, August 19, 1996

When the meaning of the disturbance became clear to him he placed a hand beside his mouth and shouted: "Hey! Frank!" in such a robustious voice that the feeble clamor of the natives was drowned and silenced.
-- O. Henry, Cabbages and Kings

Here he has seemingly swilled some of Falstaff's sack and has had robustious, fiery fun.
-- Stanley Kauffmann, "Star-Crossed Lovers", New Republic, January 4, 1999

Robustious derives from Latin robustus, "oaken, hence strong, powerful, firm," from robur, "oak."

Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for robustious


Uh Oh: "No Videos found for 'Robustious'"

So now we try Google

Uh Oh: "Your search - Robustious did not return any results."

I did find, during a Google Web Search, that Dictionary.com is repeating words of the day. Seems a bit dishonest, I feel. Oh well. Onward.

YouTube and Google are both "no go." I can't access That Video Site from work, so I may look later.

Now we come to some decisions. Dictionary.com is also Thesaurus.com. So I could try Tubing the top synonym for Robustious. Let's try that.

Uh Oh! No results found for robustious.
Did you mean rumbustious? WHAT?!

Damn. OK. Maybe I should have gone this route first. The very definition of a word is some word or words that mean approximately the same thing. I could tube the First Word of the First Sense of the word (which I now dub the FWFSW rule) and see what we hit. The logic behind this is the same as the "upside-down triangle rule" of journalism which is that information should be provided in a most important to least important continuum as you read the article so that you could stop at any point after the first three paragraphs and have the majority of the information, at least, in broad strokes. I assume Dictionary work operates on the similar priniciple, placing defining words in most accurate to least accurate order in the definition to give the closest definition with increasing refinement as you travel down the list.

In this case, the target word is "Boisterous." This word should hit a gold mine of content, but before I continue, I feel there is a philosophical problem inherent in the FWFSW rule. The problem is that a word will have multiple meanings (senses) and thus, Tubing a word will hit results for any sense in which the word is used. Robustious has two meanings, which are fairly counter to each other. Should I amend the rule to FWFSW/FWSSW (First Word of the First Sense of the Word/First Word of the Second Sense of the Word) resulting in two searches and two videos (or as many as there are senses? Would that be fair and make up in quantity what YouTube won't provide in quality? For now, that seems fairest, so our searches will be for "Boisterous" and "Coarse." (I must admit to a little trepidation with the FWSSW since that could lead to an NSFW place... Oh well. Onward.)

Okay: "Boisterous"

This is a kid's show spoof with some boister to it. Boisterous is actually a difficult word on The Tube. Nearly everything relates to drunkenness and that just seemed to easy for TOTD.


Find it here.

I had much more luck with "Coarse." Aside from many misspellings of "course," I was able to find this truly NSFW gem. If you watch it at work (no nudity), make sure to use your head phones. It has a very kids in the hall feel to it. Definite winner!


Find it here.

I hope tomorrow's word is much friendlier!