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This is a line from the movie The Ballad of Buster Scruggs:
(Buster Scruggs to the camera, supposedly to the viewer, before turning to face an opponent in a gunfight duel): Things have a way of escalating out here in the West with one thing leading to another, but I should be able to make pretty short work of this ramified old son-of-a-gun.
Dictionaries define ramify as to spread out, but I don't see how that can fit in this context. What does it mean here?
Ramify has been part of English since the 15th century and is an offshoot of the Latin word for "branch," which is "ramus." English acquired several scientific words from "ramus," including "biramous" ("having two branches"). Another English word derived from "ramus" is the now obsolete ramage, meaning "untamed" or "wild." "Ramage" originated in falconry-it was initially used of young hawks that had begun to fly from branch to branch in trees.
I expect the person who wrote this particular vignette read the term "ramified" in some Old West novel or newspaper article and decided it would sound good in the script, even if the intended meaning is not quite correct. It's certainly rare enough that few would know what it meant out of context, but in the film we can (more or less) guess what Buster is saying about his opponent.
Wright in his English Dialect Dictionary cites attestations for ramified where the word is used to refer to crops which are choked with a "rubbishy" growth. So the word could be a synonym for "worthless" or "no good"—an aspersion, as Andrew says in a comment above.
