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• arrant •

Pronunciation: æ-rênt • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Adjective

Meaning: 1. Complete, absolute, thoroughgoing, as an arrant knave. 2. (Obsolete) Wandering, vagrant, vagabond, as a knight arrant (better errant today).

Notes: Today's Good Word is a misspelling of errant that stuck. For years the two words meant the same. Recently, however, arrant has been used only in sense No. 1 above, while errant has kept the original meaning, No. 2 above. Since it is so archaic, errant is often placed after the noun it modifies (French style): a knight errant or a pastor errant, who wanders from church to church. The adverb arrantly is used, but no noun has offered itself yet.

In Play: You will probably want to use this word more often in its most recent sense: "Griswold, the arrant knave, embezzled money for years, planning to cruise the Caribbean in such arrant luxury as would put a Saudi sheik to shame." Although now archaic, errant is such a lovely romantic word, it is difficult to resist the temptation of using it: "I watched the sunset through shimmering tufts of her hair, tossed occasionally by an errant evening breeze."

Word History: Today's Good Word is, as mentioned above, a misspelling of errant, the present participle of French errer, a verb meaning (1) "to wander, roam" and (2) "to go astray wandering". We can see how these two discrete meanings can emerge from the figurative use of the basic sense, "to go wandering". The figurative use of the word in the sense of "wander off (the straight and narrow), go astray" led to the sense of "exceptional" and onward to "absolute". English also borrowed the French verb err "to err", another metaphorical sense of going astray. (We are happy that our errant Good Words reach Lew Jury and inspire him to suggest such words of today's quality to us.)

Arrant goes back to the seventeenth century: Hamlet, ...but he's an arrant knave."

"The word arrant occurs 16 times in the plays of Shakespeare, most frequently in the speech of the 'low' characters."

See complete list at: http://www.dailywritingtips.com/a-knigh ... ant-knave/

Here is one of the more colorful examples:
Dame Quickly:Yonder he comes; and that arrant malmsey-nose knave, with him. –Henry IV, Part Two II,i

Apparently he's also an errant knave.

malm·sey/ˈmä(l)mzē/Noun
A fortified Madeira wine of the sweetest type.

P.S.

Trump speech: errant breeze from arrant ass.

Apocrypha of MTC

Something about the things you all wrote
above reminded me of the Scouting Song,
"The Happy Wanderer". Good thoughts.

Malmsley?
Jacksauce?
Someone else has an apocrapha! Will?

Robert L. Stevenson called his shadow, in the Child's Garden of Verse, an arrant sleepyhead. My mother defined arrant for me when I was three years old so I could better understand the poem.