French Synonyms.—Un mirancu (obsolete: a play on mire en cul, respecting which cf., Béralde, in Molière, Malade Imaginaire: ‘On voit bien que vous n’avez pas accoutumé de parler à des visages’); un limonadier de postérieurs (popular: cf., ‘bum-tender’); un flûtencul (common); un insinuant (popular: one who ‘insinuates’ the clyster-pipe).
German Synonyms.—Rokeach, Raukeach, or Raukack (from the Hebrew).
Gallivant, verb. (colloquial).—1. To gad about with, or after, one of the other sex; to play the gallant; to ‘do the agreeable.’
1838. Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, ch. lxiv. You were out all day yesterday, and gallivanting somewhere, I know.
1862. H. Beecher Stowe, in The Independent, 27 Feb. What business had he to flirt and gallivant all summer with Sally Kittridge?
1886. Hawley Smart, Struck Down, xi. The ramparts is a great place for gallivanting.
1863. H. Kingsley, Austin Elliot, i., 112. It’s them gals, Mr. Austin. Come in afore she sees you, else she’ll not be at home. She is gallivanting in the paddock with Captain Hertford.
2. (colloquial).—To trapes (q.v.); to fuss; to bustle about.
1859. Boston Post, 10 Dec. Senator Seward is gallivanting gaily about Europe. Now at Compiègne, saying soft things to the Empress and studying despotism, now treading the battle-field of Waterloo, then back at Paris, and so on.
1871. C. D. Warner, My Summer in a Garden. More than half the Lima beans, though on the most attractive sort of poles, which budded like Aaron’s rod, went gallivanting off to the neighboring grape trellis.