Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a relatively obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar, another brick to add to the wall of your vocabulary. This week's word:
CRAPULOUS
A few years ago, one of the students in my editing class at Loyola University Maryland suggested that I cancel class the day it fell on March 18—the day after St. Patrick's Day—because he was planning to be in bad shape that day. (I said no.)
The pleasures of drink are celebrated in song and story, the aftereffects less so. This week's word, crapulous (pronounced KRAP-yoo-lus) started out meaning "intemperate in drink," but the word is now most commonly used in the sense of "suffering the effects of drink.
So, however much on the day you may experience the satisfactions rising from being tight, blotto, fuddled, hammered, pixilated, splifficated, lubricated, sizzled, looped, soused, legless, plastered, or stinko, the next morning you are going to be crapulous.
We have the word from the Latin crapula, "intoxicated," ultimately from the Greek kraipale, "drunken headache."
Example: From Don DeLillo's "Pafko at the Wall" in Harper's, October 1992: "Gleason is on his feet now, crapulous Jack all rosy and afloat, ready to lead his buddies up the aisle."