A word that addlepated me

 Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day was “addlepated,” a word my father used, often to describe himself.

My father invented words — family conversations were full of his locutions. I was almost grown before I realized that “addlepated,” a description of someone who’s confused, had been around in that sense since the 16^th century. I don’t recall hearing anyone else use the word — a blessing, since I hear the word in my father’s voice.

My father grew up during the Depression. His father, a Tennessee farmer, died young. Times were hard, and my father had no prospects of an education. But when he was 17, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, shaking the United States out of a bad case of isolationism. My father was drafted, survived the war, went to school on the G.I. Bill, and got a master’s degree from Vanderbilt. That degree, and that school, wouldn’t have been imaginable before the war.

My father was interested in local color, especially as it applied to the literature of the South. Few of his professors shared that interest. Some thought it was not a topic for serious scholarship. As my father described the English Department at Vanderbilt in the late 1940s, it was a place perhaps overly fond of the 16^th century.

That’s not the etymology of “addlepated.” It’s my guess about how the word came down to me.