There's a Word for That

In his previous post the HP noted that he doesn’t do numbers well. He can’t fathom Sudoku, for example, and calculus is a mystery. But it’s a different matter when it comes to the English language: he’s a cruciverbalist (crossword puzzle enthusiast) and logophile (lover of words) who can string together 26 little symbols known as letters to form words and meaningful sentences using proper grammar and syntax.

Yes, there’s an infinite number of ways those letters and words and sentences can be combined, but somehow that seems easier than the study of the measurement, properties, and relationships of quantities and sets using various symbols such as:

The HP’s interest in words was heightened by a college course titled “Greek and Latin Derivatives.” That sounds arcane, I know, but it is one of the two most useful classes he ever signed up for … the other being typing, which he learned in summer school at age 13.

“G&LD” taught how to parse English words derived from those two languages and discern their basic meanings without recourse to a dictionary. Take “cruciverbalist,” for example. If you can see that cruci- comes from the Latin crux (“cross”) plus verbum (also Latin, “word”) you can intuit that it’s referring to someone (the -ist) who enjoys crossword puzzles.  

So enamored of the subject of words is he that the HP keeps an Excel spreadsheet with definitions of more than (note: not “over”) 500 rare and wonderful words he’ll probably never use but likes to think about.

For example, there’s a word that names a phrase like “abso-blooming-lutely.” The word is tmesis – separation of a word or group of words by one or more intervening words, in this case the intensifier blooming.

By the way, would you know that the inserted word or phrase is known as an infix? Not bloody likely.

Here are a few other cool examples from the spreadsheet:

• Ambisinistrous – adj: clumsy with both hands, as opposed to ambidextrous
• Cockalorum – n: a self-important or boastful person. [I’m thinking of a certain someone who’s been in the news on a daily basis for the last few years.]
• Einstellung effect – n: a mindset; a set of assumptions, methods or notations that is so established that it creates a powerful incentive to continue to adopt or accept prior behaviors, tools or solutions; also described as mental inertia, "groupthink," or a "paradigm."
• Jactitation – n: false boasting or claim, especially one detrimental to the interests of another. [That same someone comes to mind.]
• Mondegreen – n: a word or phrase resulting from mishearing another word or phrase, especially in song lyrics. E.g., "the girl with colitis goes by" for "the girl with kaleidoscope eyes" in the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds."
• Nidicolous – adj: remaining with the parents for a long time after birth. [You could say to an adult offspring who wants to move back in with you, “Don’t be nidicolous!”]
• Paralipsis – n: drawing attention to something by first claiming that we don’t mean it. E.g., when someone says, “I wouldn’t say so-and-so is a ____, but...” we understand that that’s exactly what they are saying.
• Uliginous – adj. swampy; slimy; slippery. E.g., “An unctuous undercurrent of uliginous untruths."

The HP is such a word nerd that books on the subject occupy nearly three feet of shelf space in his library. Three examples are shown here.  Clockwise from upper left they are:  The Lexicographer’s Dilemma: The Evolution of “Proper” English from Shakespeare to South Park,” by Jack Lynch;  Word by Word: The Secret life of Dictionaries, by Kory Stamper; and  The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, by Simon Winchester.

The first two are somewhat technical, but Winchester’s book is an enthralling linguistic detective story. It’s the nonfiction account of how a delusional, incarcerated murderer and “madman” – Dr. William Chester Minor – struck up a correspondence with the principal editor of the OED – James A.H. Murray – and contributed greatly to its success.

Dr. Wm. Chester Minor

After fatally shooting a man but being acquitted in 1872 by reason of insanity, Minor was committed to an asylum where he lived until his death in 1920. He was allowed to keep his large personal library of antiquarian books, and from these he obsessively compiled quotations of the way particular words were used. Hearing of a call for volunteer contributors, Minor began sending his examples to Murray for inclusion in the OED’s first edition (published in 1884).

Minor was perhaps Murray’s most prolific contributor, but it was many years before he learned of the doctor’s background, finally visiting him in 1891. In 1899 Murray complimented Minor’s contributions by writing, “we could easily illustrate the last four centuries [of English usage] from his quotations alone." 

James A.H. Murray

USA Today said of The Professor and the Madman, “It’s a story for readers who know the joy of words and can appreciate side trips through the history of dictionaries and marvel at the idea that when Shakespeare wrote, there were no dictionaries to consult.”

Logophilia sounds like a mental disorder, and I guess it can become an obsession. But I’m not ashamed of my epeolatry (“the worship of words,” from Greek epos, word). It’s part of who I am. It helps put the “P” in HP.

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