- quarrelsome, disputatious, easily roused to anger. This word is only recorded in the writing of John Galt but he seems to have had a fondness for it. In The Provost (1822) he writes: There were certain propugnacious spirits in the volunteers’ committee; and they urged and persuaded the others and in his Ringan Gilhaize (1823) we find The mistress was of so propugnacious a temper, that the poor man saw no better for’t than to yield obedience. Galt did not entirely make the word up though. The Dictionary of the Scots Language cites a seventeenth century usage of propugning in the sense of defending a thesis.