aste(r)perious

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

1. from Barbara Neely, Blanche Cleans Up (Penguin, 1998), p. 99:
-----
If she'd wanted the man, she could have had him.  He had been really
clear on that.  She was the one who hadn't been clear.  She still
wasn't...  She hoped she hadn't let a good thing get away from her just
to be asteperious.  But she'd hated the idea of being matched and
labeled, and she'd never been keen on marriage.
-----

this is Blanche White, "black maid-cum-snoop extraordinaire", as the
book's back cover identifies her.  it's the word "asteperious" that
caught my eye.  its meaning was none too clear to me from the context.

2.  the dictionaries to hand were, unsurprisingly, not helpful.  so i
went to google, which had no web or newsgroup hits, but did suggest i
might have meant "asterperious" (a word that would surface as
"asteperious" in a non-rhotic dialect (such as that presumably spoken
by the north carolinan african american Blanche).  googling on *that*
took me back to Zora Neale Hurston.

3.  from the short story "Sweat", by Zora Neale Hurston:
-----
... Kill 'im Syke, please.". "Doan ast me tuh do nothin' fuh yuh. Goin'
roun' trying'
  tuh be so damn asterperious. Naw, Ah aint gonna kill it. ...
-----

and from an essay by Hurston, as cited in:

Rodney O. Lain, Signifyin(g) as a Rhetorical Device In Selected
Writings of the Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes, Zora Neale
Hurston, and Richard Wright),  1994 Masters Thesis, Northwestern State
University of Louisiana, from chapter 3:

Four years later, in a cogent observation  entitled "My People!" Zora
Neale Hurston, albeit facetiously,  echoes Abrahams' findings about
blacks' love of language, especially the tendency to create new, often
humorous words.
-----
If he can't find that big word he's  feeling for, he is going to make a
new one. But somehow or another  that new word fits the thing it was
made for. Sounds good, too.  . . . Somebody didn't know the word total
or entire so they made bodacious. Then there's asterperious, and so on.
When you find  a man chewing up the dictionary and spitting out
language, that's  My People. (Dust Tracks on a Road 218)
-----

4.  google also supplies a fair number of references to a B-24
Liberator called "Asterperious Special", flown in the South Pacific in
World War II by the Jolly Rogers (5th Airforce, 90th Bomb Group).  the
nose art depicts a "native with grass skirt next to bomb".  the native
has a bone in one ear, a large ring in the other, large red lips, dark
brown skin, and is wearing white gloves.  i can find no hint as to
where the name Asterperious came from.

5.  bizarrely, the word also turns up in a fantasy romance set in
*ireland*...

Linda Windsor, Riona: Fires of Glennmara Book II, from "A Foreword,
from the Heart of Erin...":
-----
Alls I can say is, it’s time, well enough, for the world to recognize
me Celtic forefathers as far more civilized than their asterperious
Greek and Roman counterparts gave ‘em credit for. No culture copycats
among us! Our poems and tales, preserved by word of mouth, are purely
our own dear Irish--a delight to the eye as well as the ear.
------

6.  my head hurts.  anybody have cites on this word?  anyone know it
from actual usage?  can anyone gloss it satisfactorily?    wilson?

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)