Vocabulary - Words of the Day

Let's look at some new and interesting words, shall we? Weird vocabulary, courtesy of World Wide Words.

BEJUGGLE

To outwit by trickery or deception; to cheat.

Outrageous impostor! fool, dotard, oaf! Did he think to bejuggle me with his preposterous gibberish!

Mardi, by Herman Melville, 1849.

Since we moderns know juggle only to mean expertly tossing a number of things in the air and catching them, this antique word will puzzle us. That’s because down the centuries jugglers have become more specialised.

When the word came into English, getting on for nine centuries ago, it had the same sense as its French, Italian and Latin forebears: a jester, one who amuses through stories, songs, tricks and clowning. The Latin source was joculator, from joculari, to jest or joke. The first of these has bequeathed us joculator, a jester or minstrel, now obsolete; from the same source came the better-known jocular and jocund and their relatives.

Over time jugglers became less and less general entertainers. They set aside their music and stories and became exclusively conjurors, in particular that sort who deceives his audience by legerdemain or sleight of hand. It was only at the beginning of the nineteenth century that they came exclusively to practice the specific type of manual dexterity that we now associate them with (as an historical note, later in the same century the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary didn’t include this sense of the verb juggle because the word hadn’t yet acquired it).

By the sixteenth century, the verb had developed the negative ideas of a man who deceived in earnest, not just for entertainment, who tricked or cheated another. The be- prefix was added to it in the seventeenth century to suggest that the process was happening thoroughly or excessively.

From the Spanish school of comedy came these three-ply intrigues, intricate plots, and continual disguises that weary and bejuggle the modern reader.

Portraits and Backgrounds, by Evangeline Wilbour Blashfield, 1917. The sense has here softened towards mere confusion rather than outright deception.

DANDIPRAT

A dwarf or small boy; an insignificant or contemptible person.

When the Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth wrote a letter to a friend in April 1795, she commented on her recent reading, “It is a scarce and very ingenious book; some of the phraseology is so much out of the present fashion, that it would make you smile: such as the synonym for a little man, a Dandiprat.”

She was somewhat premature: the word survives to be included in at least a few modern one-volume dictionaries because it does turn up from time to time in historical or fantasy fiction. In evidence of this, I place before you a quotation from Forward the Mage by Eric Flint and Richard Roach of 2002:

Who is so wise as to distinguish, with unerring precision, between a little man, a dwarf, a gnome, a midget, a shrimp, a runt, a pygmy, a Lilliputian, a chit, a fingerling, a pigwidgeon, a mite, a dandiprat, a micromorph, an homunculus, a dapperling, a small fry or someone with bad posture, weighted down with the cares of the world?

though this perhaps proves no more than that Messrs Flint and Roach possess a thesaurus with historical pretensions.

Nobody has the slightest idea where the word comes from. It first appears in the language in the early sixteenth century in the sense of a small coin current at the time, curiously worth 1½ pence, but then quickly develops its other senses.

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?

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There, now don't you feel smarter?