Wow, it feels like forever since I’ve done one of these! LOL. Ah, the holidays. =) But the Twelve Days and Epiphany are over, my tree is down, and it’s back to the grindstone completely this week.

One of the words I’ve had to look up in the last couple weeks and surprised me is slosh. I believe I looked it up when someone in a historical referred to someone as sloshed. A few clickety-clacks and I verified that this was a colloquialism for “drunk” by 1900, so was no problem in this particular book. But what surprised me was that slosh as a verb meaning “to splash about” didn’t come about until 1844. (I have a feeling I may have misused that in a book somewhere…) And the verb meaning “to pour carelessly” didn’t follow until 1875. Who knew they were so new?

So the adjective meaning “drunk” came from the verb, and the verb came from the noun form, which made its appearance in 1814 meaning “slush, sludge.” Which is funny, because that’s the form least-used now, methinks.

And there was have it. Not until the 1800s did this word come in to play at all, and not until 75 years after the noun did the adjective transform from the verb, so that you can say lovely things like “Only when sloshed would he slosh through the slosh.” 😉