bum squabble

English

Alternative forms

• bum-squabble

Verb

bum squabble (third-person singular simple present bum squabbles, present participle bum squabbling, simple past and past participle bum squabbled)

1. To discombobulate; to bamboozle or dupe.
   • 1986, Charles Johnson, “The Education of Mingo”, in The Sorcerer's Apprentice:

     That African, Moses saw inside a year, was exactly the product of his own way of seeing, as much one of his products and judgments as his choice of tobacco; was, in a sense that both pleased and bum-squabbled the crusty old man, himself: a homunculus, or a distorted shadow, or — as Moses put it to his lady friend Harriet Bridgewater — his own spitting image.

   • 1995, Donna Fletcher Crow, Where Love Begins, page 110:

     Do you deny the whole scene was contrived to —to bum squabble me?

   • 2011, Georgette Heyer, Black Sheep, page 96:

     I can tell you of another who is likely to bum squabble you, and that's James Wendover.

   • 2019, G.A. Gulick, The Sea of Lost Sons, page 174:

     Might be, but to my mind, we bum-squabbled him.