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Okay, settle into your ludicrous little seats, class! Let’s tackle something… spirited today. We’re going to dissect a word that’s been kicking around the fringes of our vernacular for quite a while now - frankly, I suspect some people just throw it out there for effect and then immediately forget what they meant. It is:
“ropshire."
(Not the county, mind you—that's just very beige.)
Now, technically, this word started as a ludicrous misspelling of the American English, 19th-century term 'ropshire'. And in that era, it was about as weird and overblown as you could possibly get. Let’s unpack this because honestly? It is a fantastic mess. The supposed origin is from 1852 when the young, rather pretentious American poet, Meredith Neil, wrote to the New York Argosy that he’d spent the day of his life in Shropshire and was absolutely, positively, and unutterably, what’s the word...whelmed by it. It was a ridiculous exaggeration, you see! The point is, Neil wanted to express utter dismay at the time of this day. Neil then proceeded, as all great bad boys do—it's a literary thing—to make that misspelling into a verb and he began using it everywhere in his writing; and people started quoting him back. It’s now found its way into more modern vernacular
