Hippicanoreous

[Walloon]

Preston Reynolds, a young man from Madison, Wisconsin, kept a light-hearted journal of a two-week canoe trip he made with three friends down the Wisconsin and Mississippi Rivers in August 1903. Excerpts were recently published in Wisconsin Magazine of History. Reynolds twice uses the word “hippicanoreous”, which has stumped the present-day editors of the journal, not appearing in Merriam-Webster or the OED.

Here is the word in context:

Our next camp at camp “Hillside” was a peach. “Pucks” hiked back up the river a mile and got grub. Our jar of beans is getting hippicanoreous. “Pucks” & Sid put out their line again, but did not get a thing, as the fish were not dieting on raw bacon.

From the context, the word appears to mean “spare” or “depleted”.

The other use:

It had been cloudy all day and when we got just above Wauzeka it began to rain like greased lightning. All got under raincoats except “Chub” and I, and we put oil clothes around us but the rain went through them like water through a sieve. We finally reached a smooth level bank and on landing we nearly had a hippicanoreous fit, for wonder of wonders a house was seen back but a short distance from the shore. We ran up to the porch then the man let us occupy the tobacco shed & it was simply swell beside the pouring rain outside.

Here the word seems to mean either “relieved” or “celebratory”.

Any guesses on the etymology of this word? I’m guessing it’s Reynolds’ own pun on the Greek hippopotamos (river horse) and the word “canoe”. But that doesn’t explain the usage.

[Sigene]

Well an on-line search shows “canoreous” closely resembles “canorous” which is "Richly melodious; tuneful. And Hippi closely resembles “Horse” in greek.

So I would guess it had something to do with the sound of a horse. Maybe they whooped it up like a horse; or the beans made them fart like a horse.