"He's Rosom'd it" = "he's drunk" (18th c)

[Joel S. Berson]

Thanks, Doug.  My morning at the library turned
up Farmer and Henley, as you did, as well as
Partridge (1984 ed.)  Partridge has "S[tandard]
E[nglish] _rosin_, to supply with, or to indulge
oneself in, liquor."  And lo, so does OED2, with
its earliest citation "1729 Fielding Pleasures
Town iii. i, A fiddlestick is a drunkard: Why? Because it loves ros'ning."

(I had looked only at the noun in the OED, and so
missed the verbal definition!)

Joel

At 10/4/2005 06:32 PM, you wrote:
>---------------------- Information from the mail
>header -----------------------
>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>Poster:       "Douglas G. Wilson" <douglas at NB.NET>
>Subject:      Re: "He's Rosom'd it" = "he's drunk" (18th c)
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> >How about this 1737 expression, "He's Rosom'd
> >it", meaning intoxicated?  [initial cap as in original; definitely a long s]
> >
> >I find only two "rosom*" in the OED:
> >
> >1.  An alternate spelling of "rosin" (n), with
> >one instance:  1541­2 in Swayne Sarum Churchw.
> >Acc. (1896) 269 A Torche of Rosome weynge ixli. ijs. iijd. ....
>
>Presumably a variant of "rosinned" = "drunk" shown in Farmer & Henley under
>"rosin" (also "rozin"/"rozin-the-bow", = "drink").
>
>Here "rosom" would = "rosin" [v.] and "it" would stand for "his bow", I
>presume.
>
>"Rosin one's bow" would seem to be analogous to "wet one's whistle", maybe.
>
>-- Doug Wilson