whopperjawed

English

Alternative forms

• whipperjawed

Adjective

whopperjawed (comparative more whopperjawed, superlative most whopperjawed)

1. (North Carolina) Crooked, misaligned, out of sorts.
   • 1907, Richard Taylor Wiley, “XVIII. On Bridenhall Shoal”, in Sim Greene and Tom the Tinker‘s Men: A Narrative of the Whisky Insurrection; Being a Setting Forth of the Memoirs of the Late David Froman, Esquire, J. C. Winston, page 157:

     “I much prefer straight sailin‘ tew this goin‘ in cattery-wampus towards one shore an‘ then skewin‘ off towards the others,” said he, suiting the action to the words. “It‘s enough tew make a feller whopperjawed.”

   • 1915, Clarence E. Hatfield, The Tug of the Millstone, Richard G. Badger, pages 238–239:

     “Conflicting circumstances have me so seriously muddled I am whopperjawed if I can say, but it looks like it. A boy seldom turns loose of a pocketknife by accident.”

   • 2021 September 8, George Bradley, A Stroll in the Rain: New and Selected Poems, LSU Press, →ISBN:

     Cattwumpus, arfybarsed, whopperjawed, it‘s an impossible construct, the cosmos given us to observe in the fun-house mirror of our perception, and we‘re just kids at the carnival, our faces smeared with spun sugar and wild excitement, alive and happy till we hit exhaustion and break down into tears.

References

• Wolfram, Walt, Reaser, Jeffrey (2014) Talkin' Tar Heel: How Our Voices Tell the Story of North Carolina, University of North Carolina Press, →ISBN, page 117

Further reading

• “Whopperjawed”, in The Word Detective‎^[1], 2010 December 18, retrieved 2024-06-21