Wordie [wûrd • ē]
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first listed by:
tumbel (211 words)
appears in these lists:
S, by georgielily
favorites, by Topherclay
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absurd and out-of-season, a single swan
floats chaste as snow
from "Winter Landscape, With Rooks," Sylvia Plath
In the hospital, a swan is a Swan-Ganz catheter, a special kind of line that snakes down the superior vena cava, into the right side of the heart, and out into the pulmonary artery. It's useful for measuring pressures in the pulmonary vasculature, a part of the blood circulation usually unreachable, and for measuring how much the heart is pumping.
Ohhh... "I shall warrant." I guess that makes sense. Fascinating.
C_b, I think you're on the right track. My understanding is that it was slang from the 1800s that made its way across the Atlantic at some point. Here's OED on the subject:
"prob. north. Eng. dial. Is'wan, lit. ‘I shall warrant’ = I'll be bound; later taken as a mincing substitute for SWEAR v. Cf. SWANNY v."
First time I remember seeing/hearing it was w/ Mark Twain.
I don't think I've ever heard it. Where does it come from? If it's like "I declare," then was it originally "I swear," or something like that? I mean... why swan?
My dad says, "I swannie!" No clue how to spell that.
The equivalent of I declare, at least according to the way my mother used it. Good Southernism.
As in "Well, I swan".