The word is weird not only because it looks strange and is rather rare but because it can refer to something weird (or a strange, bizarre or generally unusual happening). To increase its peculiarity, it can also mean something mildly risqué, indecent or pornographic.
“Ostrobogulous” was Vickybird’s favourite word. It stood for anything from the bawdy to the slightly off-colour. Any double entendre that might otherwise have escaped his audience was prefaced by, “if you will pardon the ostrobogulosity”.
Magic my Youth, by Arthur Calder-Marshall, 1951.
It was coined by Victor Neuburg (Vickybird in the quotation), a gay British Jewish poet and writer and a close friend of the occultist Aleister Crowley, whose sexual magic practices he helped develop.
Neuburg said that the word was formed, highly irregularly as you might expect, from Greek ostro, rich, plus English bog, dirt, from the schoolboy slang sense of the toilet, and ending in Latin ulus, full of. So “full of rich dirt”. The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t agree, arguing that the first part is from the adjective oestrous. But we ought to let Victor Neuburg have the last word, as it was his creation, even though he was a bit shaky on his etymology — the Greek word was ostreon, a type of mollusc (it’s the source, via Latin, of English oyster) that was harvested to obtain a rare and expensive purple dye, hence figuratively something rich.
Another meaning of ostrobogulous turns up occasionally.
I started out making toys because it was something I could do with no money, an artistic family and a Victorian sewing machine. In the evenings I made “ostrobogulous” toys, a term my mother used to mean harmlessly mischievous, and sold them in Heal’s, where I worked by day.
The Times, 8 Nov. 2003.
This matches a sense known to reader Graham Hill: “When I was at secondary school in the late 1960s ostrobogulous was used as an alternative name for a gonk.” (For those too young to remember, or who live in a country in which they never caught on, a gonk was a small furry soft toy, popular at the time.)
Ostrobogulous is a favourite of people like me who collect interestingly weird words. A notable appearance, in July 2009, was in the Daily Mail, a British family paper which might have looked askance at it had its editors known of its indecorous antecedents. It was quoted as the favourite word of Professor Christian Kay, who worked for 42 years on the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Honorificabilitudinitatibus
With honour.
We are in the arena of sesquipedalian words — those a foot and a half long, whose prime characteristic is their length rather than their sense or value.
Any word used by James Joyce (in Ulysses) and William Shakespeare (in Love’s Labour Lost) can’t be entirely dismissed from the canon of English, even though the former borrowed it from the latter, who in turn borrowed it from Latin. The only other person who seems to have used it, ever, was John Taylor, a Thames waterman known as the Water Poet, in the middle of the seventeenth century.
Shakespeare’s wondrous creation appears in Act 5, Scene 1:
I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word;
for thou art not so long by the head as
honorificabilitudinitatibus: thou art easier
swallowed than a flap-dragon.
(Somebody’s now sure to ask me about flap-dragon. It was the name given to a game in which the players snatched raisins out of a dish of burning brandy and extinguished them in their mouths before eating them. By extension, it was the burning raisins used in the game.)
An anagram of honorificabilitudinitatibus is Hi ludi, F. Baconis nati, tuiti orbi. In English, this says: “These plays, F. Bacon’s offspring, are preserved for the world”. This little gem of misapplied cryptography was presented by Sir Edwin Lawrence-Durning in 1910 in his book Bacon is Shakespeare as a hidden message left by Francis Bacon, who (as some are convinced) actually wrote the plays usually said to be by Shakespeare. This is all nonsense, of course — as every schoolboy knows, they were really written by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford.
But the same set of letters, tested in the common tongue, makes up Inhibit in fabulous, idiotic art, Inhabit furious libido in attic, Habitual if ionic distribution, and Hi! fabulous tit in idiotic brain. What would Sir Edwin have made of all these?
We are in the arena of sesquipedalian words — those a foot and a half long, whose prime characteristic is their length rather than their sense or value.
Any word used by James Joyce (in Ulysses) and William Shakespeare (in Love’s Labour Lost) can’t be entirely dismissed from the canon of English, even though the former borrowed it from the latter, who in turn borrowed it from Latin. The only other person who seems to have used it, ever, was John Taylor, a Thames waterman known as the Water Poet, in the middle of the seventeenth century.
Shakespeare’s wondrous creation appears in Act 5, Scene 1:
I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word;
for thou art not so long by the head as
honorificabilitudinitatibus: thou art easier
swallowed than a flap-dragon.
(Somebody’s now sure to ask me about flap-dragon. It was the name given to a game in which the players snatched raisins out of a dish of burning brandy and extinguished them in their mouths before eating them. By extension, it was the burning raisins used in the game.)
An anagram of honorificabilitudinitatibus is Hi ludi, F. Baconis nati, tuiti orbi. In English, this says: “These plays, F. Bacon’s offspring, are preserved for the world”. This little gem of misapplied cryptography was presented by Sir Edwin Lawrence-Durning in 1910 in his book Bacon is Shakespeare as a hidden message left by Francis Bacon, who (as some are convinced) actually wrote the plays usually said to be by Shakespeare. This is all nonsense, of course — as every schoolboy knows, they were really written by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford.
But the same set of letters, tested in the common tongue, makes up Inhibit in fabulous, idiotic art, Inhabit furious libido in attic, Habitual if ionic distribution, and Hi! fabulous tit in idiotic brain. What would Sir Edwin have made of all these?
Eleemosynary
Of or pertaining to alms or almsgiving; charitable.
This strange word was introduced into English in the early part of the seventeenth century. It derives from medieval Latin eleemosynarius, “compassion, mercy”, which can be traced back to the Greek eleos, “pity”. The 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica used it to describe the medieval Canterbury Cathedral: “At the greatest possible distance from the church, beyond the precinct of the convent, is the eleemosynary department. The almonry for the relief of the poor, with a great hall annexed, forms the paupers’ hospitium”. Though they don’t look it, eleemosynary and alms are connected. The second is the older, which arrived in Old English in a very distorted form via Old High German from a relative of the Latin original. At first it was spelt almes, but by the seventeenth century had been shortened to its modern form. By another route, this time through French, the Latin word turned up as aumonry, “a place where alms were given”, an office in a religious house or household of a prince or bishop; the person in charge was called the aumoner. By the seventeenth century these had come to be spelt in the modern way as almonry and almoner, but it was only at the very end of the nineteenth century that the latter was applied to an officer in a hospital who looks after patients’ welfare, a post now more commonly called a medical social worker.
This strange word was introduced into English in the early part of the seventeenth century. It derives from medieval Latin eleemosynarius, “compassion, mercy”, which can be traced back to the Greek eleos, “pity”. The 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica used it to describe the medieval Canterbury Cathedral: “At the greatest possible distance from the church, beyond the precinct of the convent, is the eleemosynary department. The almonry for the relief of the poor, with a great hall annexed, forms the paupers’ hospitium”. Though they don’t look it, eleemosynary and alms are connected. The second is the older, which arrived in Old English in a very distorted form via Old High German from a relative of the Latin original. At first it was spelt almes, but by the seventeenth century had been shortened to its modern form. By another route, this time through French, the Latin word turned up as aumonry, “a place where alms were given”, an office in a religious house or household of a prince or bishop; the person in charge was called the aumoner. By the seventeenth century these had come to be spelt in the modern way as almonry and almoner, but it was only at the very end of the nineteenth century that the latter was applied to an officer in a hospital who looks after patients’ welfare, a post now more commonly called a medical social worker.
Bafflegab
This word hit the newspapers and public notice on 19 January 1952, the day after a plaque was presented to its inventor to mark his creation of this invaluable word. He was Milton A Smith, assistant general counsel for the US Chamber of Commerce. It was presented by Michael V DiSalle, the head of the Office of Price Stabilization, who rejoiced in the title of Price Stabilizer. (Where are people like this when you need them?)
Milton Smith coined the word in a piece he wrote for the Chamber’s weekly publication, Washington Report, which criticised the OPS for the bureaucratic language it used in one of its price orders. This was picked up by the Bellingham Herald in Washington State, which wrote an editorial about it, saying “Gobbledegook is mouth-filling, but it lacks the punch of bafflegab. The inventor of that one deserves an award.” The newspaper made sure he got one by paying for the plaque to be made and organising its presentation.
The inventor said he had spent a maddening day trying to explain the OPS order to a colleague and decided a special word was needed to describe its special blend of “incomprehensibility, ambiguity, verbosity and complexity”. He tried legalfusion, legalprate, gabalia, and burobabble before settling on bafflegab. There’s nothing mysterious about the make-up of the word, and that’s part of its appeal. But it’s the stress on those plosive consonants that really makes it fly. It might well have succeeded even without the publicity associated with the award.
At the presentation, Milton Smith was asked to briefly define his word. It was, he said succinctly, “multiloquence characterized by consummate interfusion of circumlocution or periphrasis, inscrutability, and other familiar manifestations of abstruse expatiation commonly utilized for promulgations implementing Procrustean determinations by governmental bodies.” Just so.
Milton Smith coined the word in a piece he wrote for the Chamber’s weekly publication, Washington Report, which criticised the OPS for the bureaucratic language it used in one of its price orders. This was picked up by the Bellingham Herald in Washington State, which wrote an editorial about it, saying “Gobbledegook is mouth-filling, but it lacks the punch of bafflegab. The inventor of that one deserves an award.” The newspaper made sure he got one by paying for the plaque to be made and organising its presentation.
The inventor said he had spent a maddening day trying to explain the OPS order to a colleague and decided a special word was needed to describe its special blend of “incomprehensibility, ambiguity, verbosity and complexity”. He tried legalfusion, legalprate, gabalia, and burobabble before settling on bafflegab. There’s nothing mysterious about the make-up of the word, and that’s part of its appeal. But it’s the stress on those plosive consonants that really makes it fly. It might well have succeeded even without the publicity associated with the award.
At the presentation, Milton Smith was asked to briefly define his word. It was, he said succinctly, “multiloquence characterized by consummate interfusion of circumlocution or periphrasis, inscrutability, and other familiar manifestations of abstruse expatiation commonly utilized for promulgations implementing Procrustean determinations by governmental bodies.” Just so.
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