WTN: tatterdemalion
James Harbeck
tatterdemalion
Little Italian tatterdemalion
fluttered a scallion at an Australian,
sat at a mullion, butt on a railion’,
frittered his bullion, glittering gaily, an’,
settling fully in, dabbled in paleon-
tology: million coccoliths salient…
Latter-day valiant butterflies flailion’
battled a stallion, prettily alien.
Startled, the silly ’un, muttering grayly in
medical dalliance sesquipedalian,
started to sally in, as he did daily in
pattering madly his tatterdemalion rag.
Well, it does get tattered and ragged by the end, doesn’t it? But still, there’s something pretty about tatterdemalion, even if it’s just another word for ragamuffin, more or less: one of the seedy dandelions of society, a person who’s not afraid of being a frayed knot. And, from that, it has made an adjective: “The perfectly appointed Letitia contrasted sharply with her tatterdemalion paramour.”
As illustrated by the patter above, tatterdemalion rhymes with alien and sesquipedalian and so on. But it didn’t always, and there’s a hint at its origin in this. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation for it, from 1611, by one L. Whitaker, has “This Horse pictur’d showes, that our Tatter-de-mallian Did ride the French Hackneyes, and lye with th’ Italian.” A double l, and rhyming with Italian! Indeed, it is speculated that it was a fanciful formation meant to match Italian and other nouns of nationality; see this 1614 quote from one J. Cooke: “Puh, the Italian fashion? the tatterd-de-malian fashion hee meanes.”
We don’t know for certain, mind you; the cord of evidence is frayed and will not lead us to a definite end. But the tatter is just as it looks, the same tatter as in ‘shredded rag’, coming from old Scandinavian roots. The rest is just added fabric to flap inimitably gaily in the breeze.
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