Dialect Adjectives that Mean Skewed or Crooked

When working on a construction site in Kentucky, Te’koa from Norfolk, Virginia, heard someone use the term si-gogglin to describe something that’s “crooked,” or “curvy.” Variants heard primarily in Appalachia include si-goggling, sidegogglin, sidegadling, and sidegartlin’. These adjectives apparently arose from a family of dialectal terms in England and Scotland, where verbs like coggle and goggle refer to the idea of causing something to wobble or sway or totter. Other dialectal terms to describe something similarly “off-kilter” include whompy-jawed and cattywampus. This is part of a complete episode.