You would think our British brethren would have had more sense than this, but they recently installed a new Prime Minister who is a Donald Trump clone. No good can come of this. Well, except that it gives us a new Word of the Day.  

The Word of the Day is “rumbustious.” Give me a minute to get there.

As your friendly neighborhood Word Guy, I tend to look at the world through the lens of language. For example, when one considers the orgulous orange oaf in the White House (orgulous = haughty, excessively proud, arrogant), a Quinnipiac University poll showed that, when asked to describe Donald Trump in one word, the words most often used were: idiot, liar, incompetent, asshole, moron, and racist. To be fair, his supporters responded to the open-ended survey question with the words strong, leader and great. No accounting for taste, I guess.  

Now the Brits have Prime Minister Boris Johnson, their own version of Trump, right down to the bad hairdo. And a research firm called YouGov did a poll to see how UK residents view him. Just one in five expect him to be a good Prime Minister. As you might expect, Johnson got large percentages voting for untrustworthy, incompetent, dishonest, indecisive and out-of-touch.  

The top five words respondents used to describe Johnson in the survey were: buffoon, idiot, liar, clown, and untrustworthy. The top five words from his supporters were: charismatic, eccentric, flamboyant, different and intelligent. (I’m not sure how positive “eccentric” and “different” are, but there you go.)

I came across my new favorite word to describe Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson in an article in The Guardian online newspaper. It called him “rumbustious.”

Rumbustious means “boisterous, unruly, unrestrained, undisciplined,” like so many British football (i.e., soccer) fans. The American equivalent would be “rambunctious.” In fact, it’s likely that rambunctious was just an American alteration of the earlier British word rumbustious.

Rumbustious itself is probably an alteration of an earlier English word, “robustious,” a combination of “robust” and “boisterous.” In the UK, a “rum” fellow is odd or peculiar. I guess the reason I like “rumbustious” so much is because it seems to me to be more silly than mean. It’s a way to call someone clownish without using the word “clown.”

By the way, since England is the home of the Harry Potter stories, the pollsters asked which house at the Hogwarts school of magic old Boris would be put into by the Sorting Hat. The answer was “Slytherin,” by a ridiculously wide margin.

Happy Birthday Walter Savage Landor! (30 January 1775 – 17 September 1864) 

English writer and poet. His best known works were the prose Imaginary Conversations, and the poem Rose Aylmer, but the critical acclaim he received from contemporary poets and reviewers was not matched by public popularity. As remarkable as his work was, it was equalled by his rumbustious character and lively temperament. (Wikipedia)

(What a lovely word - rumbustious!)

From our stacks:

1. Spine detail of Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen By Walter Savage Landor, Esq. Second Series. (Vols.1-3.) London: Henry Colburn, 1828. 

adj. Boisterous or unruly