Until this post, "vamoosing" was a hapax legomenon in the Althouse archive.

And until this sentence "hapax legomenon" was a hapax legomenon in the Althouse archive.

I'd never used the word "vamoosing" (or "vamoose") in the entire 14-year archive of this blog until I used it in the previous post— which I did mainly for the alliteration with "value," but also because I really like it — it has a moose! — and had simply never thought to use it before.

I learned the term (and the concept) "hapax legomenon" reading Bryan A. Garner's "Nino and Me: My Unusual Friendship with Justice Antonin Scalia":

Although he had been on the U.S. Supreme Court only two years, he was already acknowledged to be its most adroit wordsmith. For example, in a judicial opinion just months before, he had used the lexicographer’s arcane phrase hapax legomenon....

“I know you once used the phrase hapax legomenon, but that’s Greek.”

“I used that phrase? Remind me.”

“It means a word or phrase that appears only once within a language or only once within a single writer’s corpus of work. You used it in your first term on the Court—in reference to the adjective material. You wrote, ‘The term material . . . is no hapax legomenon in our jurisprudence.’ ”

I do, on occasion, use a word and feel that it's the first time on the blog, and I've written about these occasions in the past (though never before using the term "hapax legomenon" to talk about the experience). I love that I can search the archive and see if my suspicion is correct. Of course, once I start writing about the odd word, I ruin its hapax legomenonosity.

I had to look up "vamoose" to see if it was transitive as well as intransitive, because I wanted to write "vamoosing the classroom." I would have thought that if I ever used "vamoose," it would be something more like "They vamoosed."

The etymology is so obvious that once you read it, you'll feel that you should have already realized it. It came from the Spanish "vamos," which means "let's go." Perhaps that's why it seemed wrong as an intransitive verb. You wouldn't say "Let's go the classroom." You'd need a preposition or two — "Let's go away from the classroom."

But the OED has "vamoose" as a transitive verb: " trans. To decamp or disappear from; to quit hurriedly. Frequently in phr. to vamoose the ranch. U.S." Three of the four historical examples have "the ranch" as the place vamoosed from, e.g., "I got that far when the eyes of the old galoots started out of their heads, and they vamoosed the ranche" (1888 E. Custer Tenting on Plains). I like the poetry of "galoots" with "vamoosed."

I got to wondering about whether "galoot" was a hapax legomenon (though by asking the question I ruined its status). But the answer was no anyway. Back in 2013, I quoted Meade (writing at the Isthmus forum): "We're all trolls... This very thread, started by someone who hides behind his troll name, fisticuffs, is an example of spiteful trollery. The question is: do you want to be an affable interesting troll - like Meade - or do you want to be a grumpy old ill-humored boring troll? Like Galoot or fisticuffs." Oh, I guess "Galoot" was somebody's screen name. It's a good one... for a troll.

But why was "vamoosing the ranch" the saying? Was it because the intransitive "vamoose" was slang among cowboys? I remember that it used to be common to say "meanwhile, back at the ranch" when you were not talking about a ranch, so, either the idea of "the ranch" is bigger than just a ranch or it's real (or Hollywood) cowboy talk that caught on.

Perhaps the OED has an entry for "meanwhile back at the ranch." Ah, yes!! It does: "originally used in western stories and films, introducing a subsidiary plot; now chiefly humorous and in extended use." The origin seems to be Zane Grey's "Riders of Purple Sage" (1912):

Meantime, at the ranch, when Judkins's news had sent Venters on the trail of the rustlers, Jane Withersteen led the injured man to her house.

Somehow, "meantime" evolved into "meanwhile" and "back" arrived. An ad in Life magazine from 1956 suggests how the phrase caught on:

Meanwhile, back at the ranch... That caption from the old silent movies prompts us to ask this question: How much of your precious time is tied up ‘back at the ranch’?