Gladsome, Jocund, Cunning Words

I first came across the word sesquipedlian in a delicious little book about books, Ex Libris, by Anne Fadiman– It makes perfect reading for Doctor’s waiting rooms. Each chapter is a stand alone essay, so you can pick it up and set it down as you need to. It’s a little gem of a book, absolutely must reading for anybody who loves reading- with some caveats.

I don’t necessarily relate to or approve of every single thing she says or believes, and neither will you. A handful of moments may bring a blush to the cheek of a young maiden, and, truth to tell, an old matron like me. Nevertheless, I consider it a happy find.

I first read this book a few years back when my oldest found a copy at a library book-sale. She began reading the first paragraph to me and I knew I needed to own this book. Anne writes about merging her library with her husband’s (they waited until they were married a few years to do this), and how they organized them, and whose copies they kept.  I couldn’t personally relate to this on a specifically personal level.  We used to tell people we had a mixed marriage because of books. My husband brought two books into our marriage- his Bible, and Helter Skelter. Merging our books meant I threw away Helter Skelter and he kept his Bible.   However, I could connect on a deeper level with how Anne and her husband felt about their books, related to them, connected with them, and bonded with specific editions.

This ability to see what she is feeling and connect with it is an indication of a good writer, but Anne isn’t just good. She’s witty. She writes that though they had been a couple for many years, their books remained separate, hers at the north end of their loft apartment, his at the south. They had talked about combining them, so that, for instance, all the Melville titles would be together, but just hadn’t done it. They finally decided to take the plunge, and immediately ran into a snag:

Our reluctance to conjugate our Melvilles was also fueled by some essential differences in our characters. George is a lumper. I am a splitter. His books commingled democratically, united under the all-inclusive flag of Literature. Some were vertical, some horizontal, and some actually placed behind others. Mine were balkanized by nationality and subject matter. Like most people with a high tolerance for clutter, George maintains a basic trust in three-dimensional objects. If he wants something, he believes it will present itself, and therefore it usually does.”

Anne believes that books and other small items are ‘unreliable vagrants,’ and must be kept ‘strictly confined to quarters,’ so they must work out a way to organize their books together. Again, please be forewarned that there are occasional comments, even in that chapter, that may embarrass some readers. For such a gladsome gift of phrasing, I am willing to overlook strong provocation, which, thankfully, she does not offer.

If I was hooked with chapter one, I was practically a raving addict with chapter two. Who could resist a book with an entire chapter about sesquipedalians? (If you could, don’t tell me. I’d rather not know). Sesquipedalians are very long words, and as children Anne and her brother used to compete to see who could find the longest. He won with paradimethylaminobenzaldehyde, which she says they sang to the tune of The Irish Washer Woman (Isaac Asimov did, too, and I’m not sure who did it first).

She writes of her delight in finding, as an adult, a book with twenty words in it she didn’t know, and I got to feel the smug pleasure of delight in knowing three she didn’t (sapoy, grimoire, and camorra), even though I feel sure she’d merely forgotten her Rudyard Kipling for at least one of them.

That book was published first in 1920, and she suggests that in 1920, readers were more educated than they are today, and certainly had richer vocabularies. She quizzed several of her friends and relations and found her 90 year old father knew 12. A friend who knew seven of them reads primarily from works published before 1918. Her brother knew nine, which she credits to his ‘unparalleled advantage of owning no television set,’ as well as his science education (he teaches natural history).

This chapter demonstrated a lovely example of the wonder of connections, whereby the more you know, the more you CAN know because you find that there are connections between things that you never knew about- and indeed, could not discover unless you were open to learning things whether or not you can see a utilitarian value to them- an English professor guessed that Mephitic must mean foul-smelling because he’d seen it used in Milton’s Paradise Lost to describe the smell of hell. Her brother guessed it was a bad smell because he knew the ” scientific name for the striped skunk is Mephitis mephitis, which means stinky stinky.” And so we strike another blow against the ‘why do we need to know this’ fallacy.=)

Knowledge cross-pollinates. The more you know, the more you can know, which is another good reason to read those old books (if we needed a reason. We are book addicts, so we don’t need a reason. You may call it an excuse or a rationalization if you prefer).

Anne asked her friends and family if they thought we knew more or fewer words now than a few decades ago. A comic (who I can’t imagine I’d find very funny), knew none of the 20 on her list yet insisted we know more words today. He said, “I bet we know at least as many, the new vocabulary of the Internet alone has easily made up for everything we’ve lost from nineteenth century literature.”

Anne found that idea mephitic and so do I.

A playwright who knew only one suggested, “We know fewer words, and the ones we know are less beautiful. …the words we’ve lost tend to be connotative, and the ones we’ve gained tend to be denotative. I’ve never seen modem used in a poem.”

Charlotte Mason was lamenting this impoverished vocabulary a hundred years ago:

We are in a bad way for epithets: there are hardly more than a dozen
current amongst us; and of these one person has seldom more than one or two in
everyday use. A cup of tea, a dress, a picture, a book, a person, — is “nice,”
“perfect,” “delicious,” “delightful,” “jolly,” according to the speaker; not at
all according to the thing spoken of. Adverbs help a little; a thing may
be “nice,” “how nice!” or “too awfully nice!” but the help is rather in the way
of force than of variety. J. finds all agreeable things “too awfully nice!”
while B. finds the same things only “nice” As a rule, things and persons have
each one distinctive quality; to see what that is in a flash, and to express it
in the fittest word, is a proof of genius, or of the highest culture.

… Little children often surprise and amuse their elders by the fitness
and elegance of their phraseology. We have only to foster this power of theirs,
to put good words in their way, to treat the perpetual use of “jolly” or
“delicious” as rather idiotic, and we are not only fitting our children to shine
in society, but doing some thing to conserve the treasures of the beautiful
mother- tongue of our inheritance. It might be worthwhile to hunt up good strong
Saxon epithets for everyday use from the writers of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Milton alone affords a treasure-trove. In the hymn
beginning, “Let us with a gladsome mind,” there are half-a-dozen adjectives used
with original force; perhaps half-a-dozen peculiar to that hymn, in their use if
not in their form. We cannot go about talking of the “golden-tressed sun”; that
is too good for us; but to get “gladsome” into our common speech is worth an
effort. “Happy-making” again, in the wonderful _Ode to Time,_ — could we have a fitter word for our best occasions?

Formation of Character, by Charlotte Mason, pages 217, 218

Random thoughts: I think of this passage every time I or somebody I know uses the word ‘cool.’
Miss Mason misquoted the title of Milton’s poem, it is ‘On Time,’ something I shall never be.
I cannot count half a dozen adjectives of the sort she suggests in Gladsome Mind.
I find more here in L’Allegro, one of my favorite of Milton’s poems.
Where Miss Mason lists five adjectives all too drearily common in every day use, I can only think of one word in several variations- cool, super-cool, way cool, so cool, and uber-cool. Such an impoverished language must denote a poverty of mind, methinks, including mine own.

There is an odd and discouraging notion that it's somehow elitist, snooty, to know and use 'big' words. Reject it. Don't use words just to show off or make somebody feel small- but do we really know real people in real life who do that? Often the larger words are more evocative and clearer about what we mean. Don't be afraid of them. Use them and use them well.

For those interested, here are a few of the other lovely new words Anne Fadimen used to add to your treasure trove:
Calineries
cajoleries
diapason
adapertile
perllan
paludal
apozemical
alcalde
agathodemon
kakodemon
goetic
sapoy
subadar
aspergill
opopanax
monophysite
cupellation
adytum

Don’t you just want to smack your lips over them?

No? Sigh. I know, I know. I am a word geek.

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