I can’t tell whether I’m amused by this word or annoyed by it, but it’s stuck in my head in either case. Yes, it does mean what you think it means (though the sources that I’ve seen suggest that it always has a jocular connotation; I haven’t been able to check my OED yet to confirm, and I’m on the road and thus don’t have ready access to UCLA’s online subscription).
UPDATE: Many thanks to readers Bill Rudersdorf and Richard Lowery, who confirmed that the OED does list this as dating back to the 1600s (so it’s not just a recent invention of people who wanted to sell dictionaries of obscure words); two of the uses don’t seem to be jocular, though the most recent one, from the late 1870s, does.
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