Cattywampus

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yes, good afternoon.

Hi, who is this?

My name is Tom DeLane, and I’m calling from Dodgeville, Wisconsin.

Well, hello, Tom. How’s things in Dodgeville?

Well, recently I used, in context, a word called kittywampus.

And I’ve done a little bit of research with the Dictionary of American Regional English, which seems to indicate that this verbiage has a Midwestern taste or flair to it.

And my question simply is, how did such a phrase ever come into existence?

It just seems to defy most of the people that I talk to.

They just can’t figure that out.

Yep, I’d say that’s about right.

Well, now, Tom, you’re saying kittywampus.

How are you spelling that?

K-I-T-T-Y, just as in the feline adolescent, Wampus, W-A-M-P-U-F, usually hyphenated.

Oh, yeah? Okay.

Because you see it a whole lot of different ways.

In fact, I think of it as sort of this wacky Swiss army knife of a word because it can be spelled lots of different ways and mean lots of different things.

The way I usually see it is C-A-T-A-W-A-M-P-U-S, catawampus.

-huh.

Have you seen it that way?

I have not.

-huh.

Well, you said that you were looking at the Dictionary of American Regional English, and if you look up catawampus, you see lots of different things that it can mean.

It can mean askew or wrong.

Some people use it to mean diagonally across from.

So, like, I cut catawampus across the parking lot, you know, from one corner to the other.

And you see catawampusly used to mean utterly or completely.

And catawampus, C-A-T-A-W-A-M-P-U-S, can also mean an imaginary monster.

Okay.

The catawampus is going to get you or something like that.

And, Tom, you’ve zeroed in on a problem that etymologists have.

I mean, how all these are connected and if they are is a pretty big puzzle.

However it is spelled and pronounced, it seems to have universal usage across generations.

Many young people, and I work in a public school, and I had an English teacher do an informal survey, and roughly 50% of her students were able to define the word without using it in context.

Yeah, you can kind of infer the askew idea, right, if you say that picture’s catawampus or Aretha was wearing that hat that was catawampus.

But going back to the original question, it’s really unknown where it came from.

Yeah, I mean, there are different ideas about this.

The wampus may come from a Scots word, that wampish, that means to twist or to swerve.

It may be somehow connected with this idea of Catawampus, the imaginary monster.

I’m not sure we’ve really sorted it out.

No, certainly there’s been some work done on this term.

People are able to find it in the 1800s in various printed sources.

But as with so many English words, it’s lost the history so far.

Well, thank you so much for taking my phone call and at least tackling it.

Well, it was our pleasure.

Thanks, Tom.

Thanks, Tom. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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