or saphead, sap-pate, sapscull, subs. (old).—1. A fool: see BUFFLE and CABBAGE-HEAD. Whence SAPPY (or SAPHEADED, &c.) = foolish; namby-pamby; lazy (B. E., DYCHE, MARTIN, GROSE, BEE).
1665. R. HEAD, The English Rogue (1874), I. v. 48. Culle, A SAP-HEADED Fellow.
1815. SCOTT, Guy Mannering, xlviii. “They’re sporting the door of the Customhouse, and the auld SAP at Hazlewood House has ordered off the guard.” Ibid. (1817), Rob Roy, xix. He maun be a soft SAP.
1840. HALIBURTON (‘Sam Slick’), The Clockmaker, 3, v. v. Talkin’ cute, looks knavish; but talkin’ soft, looks SAPPY.
1856. C. BRONTË, The Professor, iv. If you are patient because you think it a duty to meet an insult with submission, you are an essential SAP.
1884. S. L. CLEMENS (‘Mark Twain’), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, iii. You don’t seem to know anything, somehow—perfect SAP-HEAD.
1886. The State, 20 May, 217. A SAP-HEAD is a name for a fool.
1887. BRET HARTE, The Crusade of the Excelsior, II. i. These SAP-HEADED fools.
1893. MILLIKEN, ’Arry Ballads, 70, ‘On the Glorious Twelfth.’ Sour old SAP!
2. (common).—A hard worker: (school) a diligent student; a HASH (Charterhouse). Also as verb. = to read hard; to SWOT.
1827. BULWER-LYTTON, Pelham, ii. When I once attempted to read Pope’s poems out of school hours, I was laughed at, and called a SAP.
1848. C. KINGSLEY, Yeast, i. SAPPING and studying still?
1850. F. E. SMEDLEY, Frank Fairlegh, 117. They pronounced me an incorrigible SAP.
1853. BULWER-LYTTON, My Novel, I. xii. He was sent to school to learn his lessons, and he learns them. You calls that SAPPING—I call it doing his duty.
1856. WHYTE-MELVILLE, Kate Coventry, xvii. At school, if he makes an effort at distinction in school-hours, he is stigmatised by his comrades as a SAP.
1888. GOSCHEN, Speech at Aberdeen, 31 Jan. Epithets applied to those who … commit the heinous offence of being absorbed in it [work]. Schools and colleges … have invented … phrases, semi-classical or wholly vernacular, such as a “SAP,” a “smug,” a “swot,” a “bloke,” a “mugster.”
1891. LEHMANN, Harry Fludyer at Cambridge, 46. I … haven’t to go SAPPING round to get it when I want my own tea.
