Some years ago, I read an essay, “The Joy Of Sesquipedalians” by Anne Fadiman, from her collection, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. The essay begins by telling the story of how she and her brother — with the help of her father’s Wally The Wordworm — developed an appetite for words:
“Wally savored such high-calorie morsels as syzygy, ptarmigan — which tasted pterrible at first, until he threw away the p — and sesquipedalian, which looks as if it means “long word” and, in fact, does.”
She goes on to lament her diminishing vocabularic appetite as she got older.
“One of my greatest disappointments about growing up is that it has become harder and harder to achieve a Wally-like degree of sesquipedalian repletion. There just aren’t enough new words. Or so I thought until last summer, when I happened to read a book called The Tiger In The House, written in 1920 by Carl Von Vechten…”
As she read the book, she made a list of all the words which required a dictionary’s assistance:
- monophysite
- mephitic
- calineries
- diapason
- grimoire
- retromingent
- perllan
- cupellation
- adytum
- sepoy
- subadar
- paludal
- apozemical
- camorra
- ithyphallic
- alcalde
- aspergill
- agathodaemon
- cacodemon
- goetic
- opopanax
Not ONE of these words did I recognize, and the only one I thought I might have had even the slightest chance of guessing:
ithyphallic
(‘cause… you know!)
Weirdly, when I first saw the word, though, I thought it was ichthyphallic and so thought it had something to do with fish penises!
Fadiman suggested that as we get further and further away from an intellectual era in which people were more Greek- and Latin-friendly, we are less apt to be as intuitive about many words.
