This puts him in high spirits again, and he gives a large spread, and gets drunk on the strength of it.—Gradus ad Cantab., p. 129.
He sits down with all of them, about forty or fifty, to a most glorious spread, ordered from the college cook, to be served up in the most swell style possible.—Ibid., p. 129.
SPROUT. Any branch of education is in student phrase a sprout.
This peculiar use of the word is said to have originated at Yale.
SPRUNG. The positive, of which tight is the comparative, and drunk the superlative.
"One swallow makes not spring," the poet sung,
But many swallows make the fast man sprung.
MS. Poem, by F.E. Felton.
See TIGHT.
SPY. In some of the American colleges, it is a prevailing opinion among the students, that certain members of the different classes are encouraged by the Faculty to report what they have seen or ascertained in the conduct of their classmates, contrary to the laws of the college. Many are stigmatized as spies very unjustly, and seldom with any sufficient reason.
SQUIRT. At Harvard College, a showy recitation is denominated a squirt; the ease and quickness with which the words flow from the mouth being analogous to the ease and quickness which attend the sudden ejection of a stream of water from a pipe. Such a recitation being generally perfect, the word squirt is very often used to convey that idea. Perhaps there is not, in the whole vocabulary of college cant terms, one more expressive than this, or that so easily conveys its meaning merely by its sound. It is mostly used colloquially.
2. A foppish young fellow; a whipper-snapper.—Bartlett.
If they won't keep company with squirts and dandies, who's going to make a monkey of himself?—Maj. Jones's Courtship, p. 160.