Have a Crapulous Day!

On the blog tour for “The Virtuoso” one interview questions was, “What’s your favorite word?” Had I come across the word for this Word Corner post any sooner, I would have offered the following:

 Crapulous.

 I did not make this word up, it’s not a combination of crappy and fabulous, nor does it have to do (directly) with bodily elimination. This wonderfully expressive term means,

 (adj) (1) characterized by gross excesses of eating and drinking, (2) suffering such excesses.

 The noun form is crapulousness. I have been wandering around trying to use this word in sentences because this is a term that snaps and splutters. You can’t murmur this word, you can’t use it casually. It comes with implied emphasis by its very sound. I found this treasure in a tome titled, “Victorian People and Ideas—A companion for the modern reader of Victorian Literature” by Richard D. Altick (1973 W.W. Norton and Company).

Discussing the works of William Makepeace Thackery, Altick says,

 “The old rake Lord Steyne (Vanity Fair) was drawn from the crapulous Marquis of Herford, and Major Pendennis was the very model of an aging Regency buck.”

I will be up late with Professor Altick’s tome, turning pages in hopes of sighting another word that can possibly measure up to the joy of finding, “crapulous.”