Many years ago, in my increasingly dim youth, we had a teacher of English who was prone to bouts of enthusiasm about the language.
He came into the classroom one morning, trailing clouds of cigarette smoke, the Irish Independent crossword under his arm (for completion when we were otherwise occupied at an exercise he had given us) and ordered: “Write this down. ‘Words are like leaves and where they most abound, much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found’.”
It was a quote from 18th-century English poet and satirist Alexander Pope which has stayed with me down all the decades.
I was reminded of it recently when I came across some remarkable lesser-used words which have the opposite effect of all those leaves. Their sense means less. They reduce, greatly, inflation in language.
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For instance, there’s “glabella”, for the space between your eyebrows. In that instance, you have one word equalling four – “space”, “between”, “your”, “eyebrows”. Or “wamble”, for when your stomach rumbles. And what about the boringly familiar “petrichor”? For that smell after it rains.
It will probably not surprise you to know your small toe or little finger is called a “minimus”, but I bet you never realised the space between your nostrils is called a “calumella nasi”? Or that the combination of a question mark with an exclamation mark, as in ?!, is called an “interrobang”.
See what you get from reading this column, even on Mondays!
I am sure you had no idea that the dot on “i” or “j” is a “tittle”? Okay, neither had I. Or that “na, na, na”, even the “la la, la la la” meaningless sounds in esteemed songs such as Hey Jude for instance, are called “vocables”. The word could equally be applied to certain Dáil speeches, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
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I certainly suffer from “griffonage” (bad handwriting), not to mention occasional “dysania” (finding it difficult to get out of bed in the morning) and don’t talk to me about “crapulence”. Some would say I’m full of it, that sick feeling after eating or drinking too much.
Then when I feel “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace ...” I could be referring to “overmorrow”, the day after tomorrow. Wednesday, in today’s case.
Word, from Old English word, for “speech, talk, utterance”.
