Amush

[Douglas G. Wilson]

>My subscriber's friend felt, though, presumably from having met it before,
>that it is a slang term.

No reason it shouldn't be. There are slang terms which are used for one
month in one college dormitory wing and never elsewhere or before or after.
There are words used only in one family or on one street. The extreme case
is the neologism used by only one person; he/she knows how it's used, maybe
even what it means, but it's a mystery to all others. Some individuals
churn these out by the hundred.

In this case, perhaps somebody fell asleep while reading something about
southeast Asia and dreamt a conflation of "amok" and "musth" (misread as
"mush"). Maybe it's French ("en marche" = "in motion"). Anyway, I never
encountered it AFAIK, and I don't see it in my books (but I don't have an
EDD, for example). One could consider asking the user.

I don't know why "ambush" is misspelled this way so often. You'd think the
spell-checker would catch it.

-- Doug Wilson