![]() ![]() But by the mid-1700s, “salmagundi” was also being used with an extended meaning to refer to any jumble or mixture. Salmagundi - English has many words that mean “mixture,” but none is as fun to say as “salmagundi.” (The stress is on the penultimate syllable, and the word rhymes with “fundie.”) The original salmagundi was a salad that usually included chopped meat, anchovies, eggs, and vegetables, and you’ll still see this salmagundi on menus around the English-speaking world. The word was evidently cobbled together by a lexicographer, Thomas Blount, who included it in his 1656 Glossographia and modeled it on a quotation from the Latin poet Horace, who used the phrase sesquipedalia verba, or literally “foot-and-a-half-long words,” in his Ars Poetica.Ĥ. The earliest uses of the word were not exactly complimentary-one quotation from Smollett’s 1756 Critical Review notes that an author’s “sesquipedalian length of words serves to embarrass more than necessary”-and modern uses are relatively rare. ![]() Sesquipedalian - Sometimes you want a good, long word to describe the use of good, long words, and the word you want in such situations is “sesquipedalian.” It means “given to using long words,” and it has the added benefit of making its object sound very erudite while also gently poking fun at them. Use it as a highfalutin substitute for “brownnoser.”ģ. A “pickpocket” is someone who picks pockets a “scarecrow” is something that scares crows and so a “lickspittle” is someone who licks the spittle of others. ![]() “Lickspittle” is what’s called a “cutthroat compound,” which is a noun that’s made up of a verb and the thing upon which the verb acts. Lickspittle - There are countless words in English for a person who is given to fawning, self-serving flattery of others, and they are all vivid: “brownnoser,” “bootlicker,” “apple-polisher.” Try for a little variety and use “lickspittle” instead. The word used to describe the window-chucking was “defenestration,” from the Latin de-, meaning “out of,” and fenestra, meaning “window.” The best part: this event, which started the Thirty Years’ War, is now known as the Second Defenestration of Prague, and there are plenty who claim there is a Third Defenestration of Prague as well. The word was coined in the 1600s to describe an event in Prague where a group of Protestants, upset that the new (and very Catholic) Emperor of Bohemia was trying to infringe upon their religious freedom, tried two governors who had been helping the Emperor, and then threw the guilty parties from the window of Prague Castle. But even better is “defenestration’s” origin. First, this uncommon noun refers to the act of throwing someone or something out of a window, and that sort of specificity is just the thing to delight word lovers. Defenestration - While not a word that you’re likely to use often, “defenestration” is nonetheless dazzling. Enjoy these seven words you should find every opportunity to use, and maybe you, too, will fall in love with this vibrant, wild whore of a language.ġ. There are, in fact, people who write dictionaries-people whose job is, as Noah Webster put it, “to collect, define, and arrange, as far as possible, all the words that belong to a language.” Those people devote themselves to weighing the grist of the language every day: working out exactly how to describe the difference between “measly” and “teeny,” agonizing over what part of speech the “how” in “How come?” is, spending late nights at the office hammering out definitions for the word “take.” These folks are called “lexicographers,” and in the course of their work elbows-deep in the roiling muck of English, they discover that this flexible, inventive language has some delights squirrelled away into its darker and less-frequented corners. If few people give much thought to dictionaries themselves, then they give almost no thought to how those dictionaries came to be, or who created them. ![]()
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