Monday, June 30, 2008

Whit ! Ye cannae Molicate onybody any mair ?

I had quite a wee turn this week ,,
There I was with both my wee Collins Scots Gem AND my new Concise Scots Dictionary but neither one could confirm the spelling of Molicate ,,, or is it Mollicate ?
Never in my wildest dreams did I consider I was using a Non-Word !
I checked again ,,, maybe I'd missed it ? ,,, maybe there was a page missing from my new dictionary ? Alas No ,,, the word simply doesn't exist !
What a load of old rubbish ,, of course it exists !
What a sad omission however ,,, I'll need to talk to the daughter ,, she can and does introduce new words into Collins dictionaries from time to time as the language evolves !!
But hey ! ,, I've been using Molicate / Mollicate ever since I was a lad so that makes it ,, ehmmm, not very new !
I did receive the usual "help" from Bill Gates' microsoft Spell check however .,,.
Bill threw in some great Red-Herring suggestions ,, worthy of a mention !
Could it be ,,,, he asks me, in the case of MOLICATE ,,,, Medicate, militate, motivate, implicate or foliate ???
Or if MOLLICATE ,,, I could try ,,, Emolliate, collocate or collimate as well as the above militate and motivate ????
My friend & former head English teacher, one William Dickie Esq. reflected on my molication ( of the opposition btw in a recent golf tournament ) and offered the following observations on possible etymologies:

MOLIFICARE (proto Latin) - to extirpate, demoralise, render into minute particles etc. Compression over time and elision.
MOLOCH -(cognate generalisation) - Semitic god to whom parents sacrificed their offspring and by extension v.t. (verb transitive) to destroy completely
MOLICATE- almost certainly the genuine article - a wee punter from Partick expostulating as he leaves the Locarno (probably circa early '50's) after his lumber has been appropriated by another male.

So there you go ,,, it definitely exists ,,, 'cause ah kin remember leaving the Locarno masel.

And if the daughter fails to get my word into her future dictionaries I may revert to using Willie's rather appropriate Moloch !!

Oh and of course you'll all know by now that this was simply another of my Mulligrumphs ,,
n, a complaint, lamentation,; freq in pl, a state of dissatisfaction, a fit of sulks 19, now Ork EC
vi, complain, grumble la 19
So there !

Footnote : Just learned the correct spelling is MOLOCATE ! although also acceptable are ,,,
molecate, mollicate, mollocate, malacate. ,,,, To beat up, batter.

4 comments:

Thomas Widmann said...

It's spelled molocate according to the Dictionar o the Scots Leid.

The Scudder said...

Ta big Tam ,,,

terrence said...

It may be from the Mediterranean lingua franca the same as manky comes from the Italian word for a stain.

"Patate mollicate" means mashed potatoes but the word mollicate is not found in Italian dictionaries.

My understanding of mollicate is along the lines of mashing someone, although despite being on the receiving end of such threats on many occasions, I have never been "mollicaitit", as far as I amd aware.
Or it could be that I have been so severely mollicaitit so often that I have been rendered totally unaware.

Unknown said...

Of course we all molicated folk right, left and centre in the schoolyards of the swinging sixties (canny get into molocate but I will try harder).

However, I always assumed that it meant to rend asunder into molecules thus finding the etymological roots of the word in "molecule".