WordWealth: rambunctious

ram·bunc·tious , adj.

Every year, beaches along the Gulf of Mexico and the southern Atlantic coast are invaded by rambunctious college students who come to party their way through Spring Break. —— Merriam-Webster

In both these encounters I treated harmless children as if they were indeed harmless. They may have been foolish, thoughtless, rambunctious, rude, or annoying. But the only one in any danger was that baby swinging on the bar.—— Lucie Prinz; Say Something; The Atlantic; Oct 1996

MacMillan’s charged music evokes this with wild refrains, rambunctious horn lines, and an exhilarating ending in which batteries of violins hurl a frenetic unison tune at each other. Not everything was perfect in this performance, which MacMillan conducted, but the intensity was never in doubt. —— Richard Morrison; Britten Sinfonia /MacMillan; Times; March 04, 2003

So the 6th Circuit has a point, but not the point it thinks it has. Vouchers pose the risk of a public-private entanglement that is probably constitutional (and certainly should be), but that is not without cost. A reservoir of diverse and rambunctious and independent private schools, where you can teach Afrocentric creationist gay sex education without apologizing to anybody, serves legitimate liberty interests and helps stem the conformism of McSchools. At least for the poorest children in the poorest schools, I'll take vouchers, and the strings that go with them, over the current system. But there must be a better way.—— Jonathan Rauch; A Liberal Plot To Destroy Private Schools; The Atlantic; Dec 28, 2000
 

On our last evening I watched the bare banks draw higher and higher and redden, as if with clay. The decks were busy with flirting teens and rambunctious soldiers. We were now so far north that darkness never came. In the hours after midnight the sky was a phosphorescent gray-blue scrim lit from below by a hidden sun, and then a brightening canopy of daylight. We sailed into morning without stopping. —— Jeffrey Tayler' 'White Nights in Siberia'; The Atlantic; Dec 2000

Did you know? (Merriam-Webster)
"Rambunctious" first appeared in print in 1830, at a time when the fast-growing United States was forging its identity and indulging in a fashion for colorful new coinages suggestive of the young nation's optimism and exuberance. "Rip-roaring," "scalawag," "scrumptious," "hornswoggle," and "skedaddle" are other examples of the lively language of that era. Did Americans alter the largely British "rumbustious" because it sounded, well, British? That could be. "Rumbustious," which first appeared in Britain in the late 1700s just after our signing of the Declaration of Independence, was probably based on "robustious," a much older adjective that meant both "robust" and "boisterous."

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