Talk:rootch

These are mentions or mentiony, but help establish age, meaning, and areas/communities of users:

• 1870 July 28, The Nation: A Weekly Journal Devoted to Politics, page 57, discussing English in Pennsylvania among the Pennsylvania Dutch, Quakers, and others:

  We give briefly a few more of the rare words, to be "nesh" (pr. "nash") was to be in a delicate health; […] "chellers" were the comb and wattles of a cock; to “ruck up” was to rumple; variable weather was “brittle weather;" a stirring, active housewife was "work-brittle;" “rootching around" was meddling with what did not concern the meddler;

• 1947, Charles S. Rice, John B. Shenk, Meet the Amish, page 20:

  I rootched my way into the seat. (I squirmed into the seat.)

• 2015, Simon J Bronner, Encyclopedia of American Folklife, Routledge (→ISBN)

  "Dutchified" English, for example, in German-influenced areas of the Middle Atlantic region, [...with] such distinctive terms as “red up” for “cleaning” and “rootching” for “squirming.”

• 2016, Bill Casselman, At the Wording Desk, Trafford Publishing (→ISBN), page 134:

  Rootching around: Canadian and American Dialect Phrase. This is a word my late father used frequently. But first, before we get to rootching around, a very brief offering of personal history. […] To rootch is a Pennsylvania Dutch (Deutsch or German) word meaning 'to be restless in one spot, to be fidgety, to squirm, to sort through in a rough manner, to search for something lost, etc.'

(Compare rutch, rutsch.) - -sche (discuss) 00:17, 23 January 2020 (UTC)