rapscallion

plural rapscallions

1. datedA rascal, scamp, rogue, or scoundrel.

   But I’m the kind of rapscallion who often prefers the very good to the GREAT.

   2025 June 19, Scott Heller, quoting Stephen Fry, “Stephen Fry Knows He’s Become a Middle-Aged Cliché”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

   3 more examples

   “If I get away I sha’n’t be here,” I says, “to prove these rapscallions ain’t your uncles, and I couldn’t do it if I was here. I could swear they was beats and bummers, that’s all, though that’s worth something.

   1884 December 10, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], chapter XXVIII, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade) […], London: Chatto & Windus, […], →OCLC

   She was the sister who had remained within the pale; I, the rapscallion of a brother whose vagaries were trying to his relations.

   1901, Joseph Conrad, Ford M. Hueffer [i.e., Ford Madox Ford], chapter 3, in The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story, London: William Heinemann, →OCLC

   She had a studio built for him on a loft of the carriage house behind the family mansion when he was only ten years old, and she hired a rapscallion German cabinetmaker, who had studied art in Berlin in his youth, to give Father drawing and painting lessons on weekends and after school.

   1982, Kurt Vonnegut, chapter 1, in Deadeye Dick

comparative more rapscallion · superlative most rapscallion

1. Disreputable, roguish.

   "I baint a-going to give my master's property to a lot of rapscallion thieves and robbers like you."

   1895, Charlotte M. Yonge, chapter 23, in The Carbonels

   1 more example

   [H]e is dressed in such a rapscallion manner that the people would think you were talking to a house-breaker.

   1869 May, Anthony Trollope, “Miss Stanbury’s Generosity”, in He Knew He Was Right, volume I, London: Strahan and Company, […], →OCLC, page 93