Originally Posted By: zmjezhd
There's a verb, to yawp 'to cry, bark', which is a variant of to yelp. As with many verbs, this, too, has been nominalized (nouned if you'd rather). From there, it is a short hop-skip to adjectival derivation by use of the suffix -ish. That's all conjecture, and tsuwm has suggested elsewhere that it might mean 'noisy, clamorous'.


The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me--he complains of my gab and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed--I too am untranslatable;
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

-- Song of Myself, Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1855