A Collection of College Words and Customs eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 623 pages of information about A Collection of College Words and Customs.

A Collection of College Words and Customs eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 623 pages of information about A Collection of College Words and Customs.

2.  A foppish young fellow; a whipper-snapper.—­Bartlett.

If they won’t keep company with squirts and dandies, who’s going to make a monkey of himself?—­Maj.  Jones’s Courtship, p. 160.

SQUIRT.  To make a showy recitation.

  He’d rather slump than squirt.
    Poem before Y.H., p. 9.

Webster has this word with the meaning, “to throw out words, to let fly,” and marks it as out of use.

SQUIRTINESS.  The quality of being showy.

SQUIRTISH.  Showy; dandified.

It’s my opinion that these slicked up squirtish kind a fellars ain’t particular hard baked, and they always goes in for aristocracy notions.—­Robb, Squatter Life, p. 73.

SQUIRTY.  Showy; fond of display; gaudy.

Applied to an oration which is full of bombast and grandiloquence; to a foppish fellow; to an apartment gayly adorned, &c.

  And should they “scrape” in prayers, because they are long
  And rather “squirty” at times.
    Childe Harvard, p. 58.

STAMMBOOK.  German.  A remembrance-book; an album.  Among the German students stammbooks were kept formerly, as commonly as autograph-books now are among American students.

But do procure me the favor of thy Rapunzel writing something in my Stammbook.—­Howitt’s Student Life of Germany, Am. ed., p. 242.

STANDING.  Academical age, or rank.

Of what standing are you?  I am a Senior Soph.—­Gradus ad
Cantab.

  Her mother told me all about your love,
  And asked me of your prospects and your standing.
    Collegian, 1830, p. 267.

To stand for an honor; i.e. to offer one’s self as a candidate for an honor.

STAR.  In triennial catalogues a star designates those who have died.  This sign was first used with this signification by Mather, in his Magnalia, in a list prepared by him of the graduates of Harvard College, with a fanciful allusion, it is supposed, to the abode of those thus marked.

    Our tale shall be told by a silent star,
  On the page of some future Triennial.
    Poem before Class of 1849, Harv.  Coll., p. 4.

We had only to look still further back to find the stars clustering more closely, indicating the rapid flight of the spirits of short-lived tenants of earth to another sphere.—­Memories of Youth and Manhood, Vol.  II. p. 66.

STAR.  To mark a star opposite the name of a person, signifying that he is dead.

Six of the sixteen Presidents of our University have been inaugurated in this place; and the oldest living graduate, the Hon. Paine Wingate of Stratham, New Hampshire, who stands on the Catalogue a lonely survivor amidst the starred names of the dead, took his degree within these walls.—­A Sermon on leaving the Old Meeting-house in Cambridge, by Rev. William Newell, Dec. 1, 1833, p. 22.

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
A Collection of College Words and Customs from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.