Each one a bold seed, well fit for the deed,
But of course a little bit flurried.
Ibid., May, 1852.
SEEDY. At Yale College, rowdy, riotous, turbulent.
And snowballs, falling thick and fast As oaths from seedy Senior crowd. Yale Gallinipper, Nov. 1848.
A seedy Soph beneath a tree. Yale Gallinipper, Nov. 1848.
2. Among English Cantabs, not well, out of sorts, done up; the sort of feeling that a reading man has after an examination, or a rowing man after a dinner with the Beefsteak Club. Also, silly, easy to perform.—Bristed.
The owner of the apartment attired in a very old dressing-gown and slippers, half buried in an arm-chair, and looking what some young ladies call interesting, i.e. pale and seedy.—Bristed's Five Years in an Eng. Univ., Ed. 2d, p. 151.
You will seldom find anything very seedy set for
Iambics.—Ibid., p. 182.
SELL. An unexpected reply; a deception or trick.
In the Literary World, March 15, 1851, is the following explanation of this word: "Mr. Phillips's first introduction to Curran was made the occasion of a mystification, or practical joke, in which Irish wits have excelled since the time of Dean Swift, who was wont (vide his letters to Stella) to call these jocose tricks 'a sell,' from selling a bargain." The word bargain, however, which Johnson, in his Dictionary, defines "an unexpected reply tending to obscenity," was formerly used more generally among the English wits. The noun sell has of late been revived in this country, and is used to a certain extent in New York and Boston, and especially among the students at Cambridge.
I sought some hope to borrow, by thinking it a "sell"
By fancying it a fiction, my anguish to dispel.
Poem before the Iadma of Harv. Coll., 1850, p. 8.