👉 Okay, let’s tackle this wonderfully odd little squiggle of a word! Defining "…the happiest"... is trickier than untangling a toddler's spaghetti during a hurricane, frankly.
Basically, when you see the pointy-headed dude Bartholomew Higgins banging around his insistence of saying something about “...the nappiest", he isn’t necessarily describing a well-ington boot filled with fluffy marshmallows. Unless that was Bartholomew Higgins, in which case... carry on. He was rather attached to those boots.
Rather than it simply meaning "most comfortable," the actual word is an antiquated and delightfully bizarre turn of phrase. Historically (and here I'm borrowing from exceedingly stuffy Victorian gentleman club minutes - you wouldn’t
want
to actually read them, they are beige and terribly dull) , it referred to someone who was in a state of almost indecent, profoundly relaxed bliss. Not just comfy. Think of the kind of contentment that makes a badger yawn into the face of a very aggressive squirrel – this is what we mean by nappiest. It’s a state beyond comfort, an engulfing, somewhat alarming level of being
gone to fluff
.
The origin is genuinely murky—possibly from old English terms relating to sheep bedding (the absolutely most nappiest thing you could possibly imagine... seriously, have you ever spent an afternoon in the fleecy expanse of a really good Shropshire down? It was, frankly, life-altering. Bartholomew Higgins knew that!