Sunday Word: Ripsnorter
ripsnorter [rip-snawr-ter]
noun:
(informal, slang)
1 something or someone exceedingly strong or violent
2 something or someone remarkably good or exciting
Examples:
'Memphis,' his instrumental version of Chuck Berry's 'Memphis, Tennessee,' was a rockabilly-blues ripsnorter with a scorching 12-bar solo. (William Grimes, Lonnie Mack, Singer and Guitarist Who Pioneered Blues-Rock, Dies at 74, The New York Times, April 2016)
Listen up, dumpling fanatics, this place is a ripsnorter. Potstickers? Oh yeah. Xiao long bao? You betcha. Frilly shark fin steamers submerged in a chilli oil soup? Bring it on home, sweet momma. (Nina Rousseau, Eastern Dumpling House, The Age, March 2012)
There's a ripsnorter about a carnivorous tree-climbing buffalo, and a great sight gag when the three prospectors are lost in a blizzard and follow their own ever-widening trail like demented bird dogs. (Lawrence Bommer, Roughing It , Chicago Reader, March 1991)
Making all that happen is a savvy script that sticks to the truth only when it needs to and an actress who gives a gleeful, ripsnorter of a performance. (Kenneth Turan, Emma Thompson is a ripsnorter in 'Saving Mr Banks', Los Angeles Times, December 2013)
Poor little guy! He'd just about convinced himself that he's a real ripsnorter of a buck. (James Arthur Kjelgaard, Double Challenge)
"I had a ripsnorter of a fright myself last week," said Abe. "Was comin' down with an extra big load on, an' jes' past Black Gully I pulled up to give th' cattle a blow. Was squattin' in th' shade, with me back agin a coolabah, when something limp an heavy comes whack on to me head an' begins to claw an' scratch about like fightin' tomcats." (Edward S Sorenson, Aunt Jo - A Love Story of the Cedar Scrubs)
Origin:
'something of exceptional strength, someone of remarkable qualities,' 1840 [Davy Crockett], probably from rip ('tear apart, cut open or off', c 1400, rippen, 'pull out sutures,' probably from a North Sea Germanic language (compare Flemish rippen 'strip off roughly', Frisian rippe 'to tear, rip'; also Middle Dutch reppen, rippen 'to rip') or else from a Scandinavian source (compare Swedish reppa, Danish rippe 'to tear, rip') + snorter (c 1600, 'one who or that which snorts'). (Online Etymology Dictionary)
Its first appearance was attributed to Davy Crockett ('Of all the ripsnorters I ever tutched upon, thar never war one that could pull her boat alongside of Grace Peabody'). But as the word appeared in one of a series of almanacs bearing his name in 1840, four years after he died at the Alamo, we must take the link with a pinch of salt - as we must such other supposed coinages of his as circumflustercated and scentoriferous, part of the largely fictitious tall-talking vocabulary of mountain men that the almanacs almost single-handedly invented. Snorter has had various senses that imply that something is an extreme or remarkable case of its kind. To take one example, around the time that ripsnorter appeared, snorter was applied to an especially ferocious storm, a sense that is alluded to in the slightly opaque example from the Crockett almanacs... Rip may be a more-or-less meaningless intensifier, as it is in words like rip-roaring, though its sense of 'rip' or 'tear' may contribute energy and vigour. However, the storm sense of ripsnorter's second element suggest rip might have another of its meanings, a stretch of broken water, as in rip tide and rip current. (World Wide Words)