Spizzerinctum

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, Martha and Grant. This is Randy Cole from Dallas, Texas.

Hi, Randy.

Hey, Randy. What’s up?

Well, I have a two-word question.

This is about two words that I heard when I was growing up in eastern Colorado.

And I heard them from someone who broadcast the play-by-play on the local radio station.

He would broadcast the Friday night football games.

And when a team was not doing well, he would say something like,

They’re going to have to show some real spizzeringdom and huckledee buck

If they’re going to win this game.

And so my two words are spizzeringdom and huckledee buck.

Spizzeringdom and huckledee buck.

What do you take that to mean?

Well, I think I know what they mean because the context is pretty good,

And I looked them up.

I’m more curious probably about their origin and where they came from.

And spizorinctum seems to mean fire or passion and maybe even nerve, as in kind of a Gentile version of chutzpah.

And huckily buck means grit and determination and just getting the job done.

Interesting, yeah.

We actually have a bunch of citations for Spitzerrington on our website in our dictionary,

Because I spent some time collecting a wide variety of spellings for this term going back to the 1840s.

And a lot of different spellings, and they almost always mean, as you say,

Vim or vigor or energy or oomph or just spirit.

Sometimes you’ll find it as the name of a ladies’ club or the school yearbook or the high school newspaper.

Sometimes it appears in sports context, just as it did when you heard it.

It’s really interesting.

We don’t know the origin of Spitzerrington,

But the speculation that I’ve seen that I really like is that it’s false Latin.

That was going to be my guess.

Sort of from that same era.

Yeah, it sounds vaguely naughty but isn’t.

Let’s just get that out of the way.

But it probably means, I’m sorry,

It’s probably meant to replicate the look and feel and sound in the mouth,

The mouthfeel of a Latin word.

Yeah, except for that is in there.

But I think that gives it fizz or bubbly.

Yeah, it sounds like pizzazz.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And now Huckleberry Buck is another case, which it’s really great that you bring this to our attention.

It is a term that has been widely used for probably more than 100 years,

And its meaning is hard to pin down because the context isn’t always clear.

It can mean energy, like the energy or force that you put into something like,

They went into a game with a lot of Huckleberry Buck and they pulled out a win.

But it can also mean commotion or craziness.

He came home from work and his house was all in a Huckleberry Buck

Because his daughters had three of their friends over.

You know, so it can mean that as well.

But what I love about Huckaldee Buck is that it’s not in any dictionary that I can find under no spelling that I’ve checked.

And this is really interesting that a word can exist in English for more than 100 years and yet be unrecorded in any of the dictionaries.

I mean, I have hundreds of dictionaries.

The best works that I checked, it’s not in them.

So crazy to me.

So Spitzeringsome, who was the guy that used this?

They both sound incredibly old-fashioned to me.

Well, he was not an old person.

He was perhaps in his 40s, and he owned the local radio station,

Which I actually worked as a teenage disc jockey for on weekends.

I was going to say, that sounds like a radio voice to me.

And I’m not sure whether he originated.

I think I remember my English teacher using it humorously,

And people around town would use it, you know, because everybody listened to the games,

And it spread widely, and people would use it sort of with a smile on their face.

One of the more common spellings of Spizerinctum, if you want to look it up on our website,

Is S-P-I-Z-E-R-I-N-C-T-U-M.

Sometimes it’s a double Z, S-P-I-Z-E-R-I-N-C-T-U-M.

And you’ll find a bunch of citations for this, a bunch of different terms.

It’s really, really interesting how far back it goes to the 1840s at least.

Long, long history.

Huckleberry Buck.

I’ve got to do an entry for that, Martha.

Do it.

We should not let words go unrecorded in the dictionary, right?

Especially that one.

Huckleberry Buck.

Yeah.

We’ll wait to see it in the new dictionary.

All right.

Thank you so much for your call, Randy.

Thanks, Randy.

Thanks very much.

I really enjoy your show, learn a lot, and you guys really do good work.

Oh, thank you very much.

Thanks so much, Randy.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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