ˌflɒksɪˌnɔːsɪˌnɪhɪlɪˌpɪlɪfɪˈkeɪʃən

Floccinaucinihilipilification: The act of estimating as worthless

Flocci, nauci, nihili, pili, assis, hujus, teruncii, his verbis, aestimo, pendo, facio, peculiariter adduntur.

Eton Latin Grammar (1758)

What the sentence above was telling generations of Etonians is that the verbs aestimo (“to value”), pendo (“to weigh or consider”) and facio (“to make”) take certain objects irregularly in the genitive case. These objects are floccus (“tuft of wool”), naucum (“trifling thing”), nihilum (“nothing”), pilus (“hair”), as (“penny”), hic (“this”) and teruncius (“farthing”).

The first four genitives (flocci, nauci, nihili, pili) all provided metaphors for worthlessness.  Non flocci facere, for instance, was a phrase meaning “to consider of no importance”. In the days of rote learning, “flocci, nauci, nihili, pili,” no doubt tripped off the tongue, and presumably stuck in the memory of many a Latin student. So floccinaucinihilipilification came into existence as a bit of ironic fun at the expense of the Latin classroom.

The Oxford English Dictionary attests its earliest written use, in the form “flocci-nauci-nihili-pili-fication”, in a letter by William Shenstone in 1741, slightly before the publication of the Eton Latin Grammar—but the Eton grammar was a codification of a much older standard text by William Lily. Presumably Shenstone had studied this earlier version of the Eton text.

If something is worthy of floccinaucinihilipilification, then it is floccinaucical: trifling. It is in a state of floccinaucity. If you don’t have time to floccinaucinihilipilify something, then you might just floccipend or floccify it instead—the three are synonymous.

Floccus (“tuft of wool”) also gives us the medical term floccillation, which is the delicate plucking movement sometimes exhibited by people suffering from delirium, as if picking at hallucinatory tufts of wool. It has a Greek synonym, carphology, “twig collecting”. It may also be responsible for the word flock, as applied to coarse tufts of wool used for insulation, and frock, the long garment of which disgraced priests were unfrocked—but there’s some doubt as to whether these come to us from Latin or from the Germanic languages.

Naucum (“trifle”) hasn’t done much else for the English language except provide us with naucify, another synonym for floccinaucinihilipilify.

Nihilum (“nothing”) gives us nil, “nothing”, annihilate, “to reduce to nothing”, and nihilism, a belief in nothing much. And Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined transnihilation, the transformation of nothing into nothings; that is, a proliferation of nothings. It’s a fine dismissive term for the make-work record-keeping of modern organizations, and it needs to be revived and released into the environment.

Pilus (“hair”) gives us the pile on a carpet. Something that bears hair is pilose, piliferous or piligerous, and something that resembles a hair is piline or piliform. Something that removes hair is depilatory, and something that makes your hair stand on end is a horripilant, causing horripilation. And few things cause horripilation like pilimiction—the passing of hair-like objects in the urine. That may seem positively hallucinatory, but it’s a real thing. A blow to the kidney can cause bleeding into its fine internal tubes. And if blood clots there, it eventually shows up as fine, dark, hair-like casts in the urine. Something not to be  floccinaucinihilipilified.

Note: In case you’re worrying that floccinaucinihilipilification might have become extinct by now, I’m pleased to report it was used in the UK House of Commons as recently as 21 February 2012, by Jacob Rees-Mogg, the (predictably) Conservative Member of Parliament for North East Somerset (and son of the perhaps very slightly more famous William Rees-Mogg):

“I am glad to say, Mr Deputy Speaker, that the requirement not to be rude about judges applies only to judges in this country. It does not apply to judges in the EU [European Union], so let me be rude about them. Let me indulge in the floccinaucinihilipilification of EU judges …”

So there you are—recorded for posterity in Hansard. *

* And in case you’re worrying why the printed record of debates in the House of Commons and House of Lords is called Hansard, it’s named after the printer T.C. Hansard, who started publishing unofficial records (written by William Cobbett) in 1809.

fɔəˈɡəʊ

forgo: To abstain from, go without, deny oneself

If that word looks a little odd to you, it’s perhaps because you’ve seen it written “forego” more often than “forgo”.

But forego is a different word, meaning “to go before, or in advance of”. At a Burns Supper, a few may be tempted to forgo the haggis, but only the piper is required to forego the haggis.

The trouble is, the verb to forego isn’t much used any more. It generally only sees the light of day as an adjective, as either foregoing or foregone, the latter almost always in the stock phrase “foregone conclusion”. Forgo is in more common use—people forgo things more often than they forego things. But since that Old English for- prefix is relatively unfamiliar, whereas fore- is still being used to form new words, the more common word seems to be making a determined bid to steal the other’s spelling.

Another for-/fore- confusion, invisible to spellcheckers, crops up with the forbear/forebear pair. The verb is to forbear, meaning “to abstain or refrain from”; the noun is forebear, meaning “an ancestor”.

And then there’s forgather/ foregather. A Scots word, borrowed from the Dutch, to forgather is “to assemble, to gather together”. Somewhere along the line people began to write foregather instead, as if the gathering was being done in preparation for some event. Nowadays you can get away with either spelling, but the fore- version is a little misleading.

The prefix fore- almost always signals something to do with the idea of preceding, in time or space—think forecast or forefront. But for- turns out to be a bit of a mess. The Oxford English Dictionary manages to come up with ten subtly different meanings signalled by for-, but I won’t list them all. The highlights, together with some examples still in (more or less) current use are:

• away, off, apart: forget, forgive
• prohibition: forbid, forfend
• abstention or neglect: forbear, forgo, forsake, forswear
• excess or intensity: forlorn

That last one makes us wonder what “lorn” might mean, if forlorn is to be interpreted as “intensely lorn”. It turns out that there was an Old English verb leese, “to be deprived of”, of which lorn was the past participle, later pressed into adjectival use: “abandoned, desolate, wretched”.

Being an Old English prefix, we can find analogues of for- in other Germanic languages—German and Dutch have a prefix ver-, for example, which does a similar job. It crops up in the old Dutch expression verloren hoop, “lost troop”, who were a group of picked soldiers sent out in advance of the main party as skirmishers. Bad stuff tended to happen to them. (The French called such soldiers the enfants perdus, “lost children”.) Verloren hoop made its way into English as both forlorn hope and flowing hope. The latter seems more upbeat, but the former prevailed in common usage:

FORLORN HOPE. Officers and men detached on desperate service to make a first attack, or to be the first in mounting a breach, or foremost in storming a fortress, or first to receive the whole fire of the enemy. […] Promotion is usually bestowed on the survivors.

Admiral W.H. Smythe The Sailor’s Word Book (1867)

Nowadays, we’re left with only the figurative meaning.

There used to be a lot more for- words than there are now, and I for one mourn their passing. Here’s a sampler:

Verbs:
forslug: to neglect through sluggishness
forgab: to defame; to publish someone else’s misdeeds
forgnaw: to gnaw to pieces
forweep: to exhaust oneself through weeping
fordin: to fill with noise
forbliss: to make happy
fordeave: to deafen
formeagre: to make thin

Adjectives:
forfrorn: stuck fast in ice
forswarted: blackened
forbritten: broken in pieces
forcrazed: fallen to pieces
forfrushed: shattered to pieces
forstormed: tempest-tossed
forwintered: reduced to straits by winter
forflitten: excessively scolded
forglopned: overwhelmed by astonishment
forswunk: exhausted with labour

Surely, between us, we can get some of these back into circulation?

Note: Predictably enough, the spellchecker on my website software refuses to believe there’s such a word as forgo. Sigh.

ˈskaɪəpɒd

Skiapod or Sciapod: A mythological human with a single leg and large foot, used to provide shade in tropical regions

The existence of skiapods was common knowledge in Classical times—they are mentioned by Aristophanes in his play The Birds, and by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, in which the are described as inhabiting India.

The name comes from the Greek skia, “shadow”, and the pod combining form of pous, “foot”, that I’ve talked about already. So the skiapods were “shadow feet”. Makes sense. You can use the word skiapodous or sciapodous to refer to anyone with large feet.

The skiapods were just one of many races of imaginary types of person who populated the remote corners of the Classical and Mediaeval world. The Nuremberg Chronicle also provides illustrations of the Blemmyae (who had no heads, but faces in their chests) and the Panottii (who had large ears they could use instead of clothing).

Greek skia, “shadow”, produced a lot of words, but you have to go digging to find them. Skiagraphy or sciagraphy is “shadow drawing”, and it seems to have had a number of meanings over the years. It has been applied to that complicated part of perspective drawing that involves accurately rendering shadows:

But it also has been used for the drawing of silhouette portraits, for the making of X-ray images, to refer to any sort of rough sketch (presumably because the sketch  foreshadows the final version),  and for the telling of time using  shadows—that is, by sundials (of which, more later).

Skiamachy or sciamachy is “shadow fighting”: either literal shadowboxing (for training in combat sports), or metaphorical fighting with imagined enemies.

An antiscian is a person whose shadow points in the opposite direction to yours: someone on the same meridian  but in the opposite hemisphere. (Strictly, that only works properly outside the tropics.) I’ve waited all my life for a chance to use that word, but the occasion doesn’t come up very often.

A macroscian is a person with a long shadow; not usually a tall person, but instead one who lives at high latitudes, where the sun is always low in the sky. A periscian also lives at high latitudes, but specifically within one of the polar circles. The word means “all-around shadow”, and if you live within one or other of the polar circles there will be at least one day of the year on which the sun never sets, and your shadow will sweep right around you during the course of the day.

An ascian has no shadow. The word designates someone who lives in what was called the Torrid Zone when I was at school—between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. Anywhere in that region there will be two days a year when the sun is directly overhead at noon, and people appear to cast no shadow. The word amphiscian means “both-sides shadow”, and also designates the folk in the Torrid Zone, who (on every day but an “ascian” day) may see the sun either to the north or south at noon, and who therefore can cast shadows in either direction at that time.

That’s the inhabitants of the polar and torrid zones dealt with. What about those in the temperate zones? They’re heteroscians—”different shadows”. In the temperate zones, the direction of your shadow at noon is always the same—it points north in the northern hemisphere, and south in the southern hemisphere. People in the two zones are therefore always heteroscian to each other: their noon shadows point in opposite directions. So the word should really be used by one bunch of people, in one temperate zone, to talk about the other bunch of people in the other temperate zone. But instead it’s applied loosely to all the inhabitants of temperate zones, presumably because someone felt the need to come up with some sort of shadow-based nomenclature to match periscian and amphiscian.

While these are fine linguistic curiosities, they say important things about the world. Since shadow directions at noon are always opposite in the two temperate zones, but the sun always progresses across the sky from east to west, shadows sweep in opposite directions as the day progresses in the two zones: clockwise in the north, anticlockwise in the south.

So for the purposes of skiagraphy, sundials need to be numbered in different directions, according to which side of the equator they’re on:

ˈpɒdəʊskæf

Podoscaph: A canoe-shaped float attached to the foot, for walking on water

The word is formed by attaching the Greek prefix pod(o)- (derived from pous, meaning “foot”) to skaphos, “ship”.

In the fifteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci toyed with podoscaph design—but, realizing that they wouldn’t be a particularly stable mode of locomotion, he sketched in a pair of ski-pole floats for his water-walker, too.

The little model built for the Macchine di Leonardo exhibition makes the design clearer, but no more convincingly stable.The Greek skaphos gave Auguste Piccard the name for his bathyscaphe (“deep ship”), the free-diving, deep-sea submersible that he designed in 1937, which he contrasted with Beebe and Barton’s earlier bathysphere (1934), which merely dangled from a cable.

And before moving on to other things, I can’t help but mention Jean Baptiste de La Chapelle‘s scaphander (“ship man”), a sort of cork jacket to aid locomotion in water. The illustration below, from his book Traité de la construction théorique et pratique du scaphandre, ou du bateau de l’homme (1775), speaks for itself. Though I’m not entirely sure what it’s saying.

A thing that looks like a ship is scaphoid. There’s a gently curved scaphoid bone in your wrist. (It has a Roman cousin in your foot—the navicular bone, from the Latin navicula, “little ship”.)

A feature of extreme malnutrition is a scaphoid abdomen. When a starved person lies flat, the abdomen sags inwards. The v-shape of the ribs above is the prow of this abdominal ship, the curve of the pelvic bones below is the stern, and the inward-sagging abdomen between resembles the hollow inside of the ship’s hull.

Now, back to the other half of podoscaph:

That combining form pod(o)-, for “foot”, gives us podiatry “foot surgery”. Chiropody, a different name for the same job, is a “factitious designation”, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s not clear whether the inventor of the term meant to combine cheiro-, “hand”, with pous, “foot” (thereby suggesting chiropody should involve both the hands and feet) or was using the Greek cheiropodes, “having chapped feet”. Neither quite makes sense, but neither is quite nonsense, either.

There are a huge number of foot-related words ending either -pod (Greek) or -ped (Latin), which are hardly worth discussing individually. But it’s worth mentioning octopus (“eight foot”) and platypus (“flat foot”), which are both derived from Greek pous, “foot”. That -us at the end is a trap for the unwary, luring us into trying out a Latin plural form, after the fashion of cacti, fungi, nuclei and hippopotami—but “octopi” and “platypi” are just plain wrong. If you want a Classical plural, it needs to be Greek: octopodes (ɒkˈtəʊpədiːz) and platypodes (plæˈtɪpədiːz) are what’s required— each with four syllables, emphasis on the second syllable. Try it, by all means. But people will look at you strangely. There’s nothing wrong with forming standard English plurals instead: octopuses and platypuses.

The Greek -podes plural is familiar from antipodes, “opposite feet”—people on the opposite side of the world have their feet pointing towards us. But note that antipodes is singular: each location on the globe has only one antipodes, all to itself. It’s tempting to work backwards from octopus and platypus to come up with a truly singular antipodal form: “antipus”. (Well, I find it tempting.) But that would imply that there was only one person in the opposite side of the world from you, and that they had only one foot.

Television? The word is half Greek, half Latin. No good can come of it.

C.P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian

Hybrid formations are words made up of elements derived from different languages. Some people can get very annoyed about this, as did C.P. Scott, above, back in the early days of television. Scott was objecting to the fact that the new word television had been formed from the Greek root tele-, meaning “far off”, attached to the familiar word vision, which is of Latin origin. It had presumably been created by analogy with telegraph and telephone; but both those words are Greek from start to finish, formed from graphe, “writing”, and phone, “voice”.

The trouble with getting annoyed about hybrid words is that they’re everywhere. If you clap an Old English suffix like -ness on to a Latin import like genuine, you have a hybrid; if you add an imported suffix like -able on to an Old English stem like read, you have a hybrid. It gets rather difficult to use English if we disallow all combinations of this sort.

But the ire of the self-styled purists is generally reserved for recently formed words—their newness and unfamiliarity seems somehow to make their hybrid nature more objectionable. H.W. Fowler could be relied upon to express weary contempt for a lot of common English usage, and hybrids were not exempt. In A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) he made a list of words “of which all readers will condemn some, & some all”. The list included words that are now commonplace, such as amoral, bureaucracy, coastal, colouration, pacifist and speedometer. It also contained a selection that are now pretty much extinct: amusive, backwardation, dandiacal and funniment.

So it seems that there must be other factors that determine whether a word survives and flourishes, or withers and dies. As Robert Burchfield noted in the revised third edition of Modern English Usage: “… a word will settle in if there’s a need for it and will disappear if there is not … amoral, bureaucracy, and the other mixed-blood formations persist, and the language has suffered only invisible dents.”

Hybrid words are sometimes referred to as heteroradicals, from Greek heteros, “different”, and Latin radix, “root”.  I’m sure I can’t be the only one who derives an utterly disproportionate amount of satisfaction from the idea that heteroradical is a heteroradical.

Unfortunately, heteroradical is also used to designate a completely different class of words, a subdivision of the homonyms.

Homonyms are words that have the same pronunciation and spelling, but different meanings: for example, the address that you live at, and the address that you make to an audience. Heteroradicals are the subclass of homonyms that also differ in etymology (that is, they’re derived from different roots): for example, the chain mail in a suit of armour and the mail that is delivered to your letter-box. So for the kind of words we’re discussing here, the term hybrid turns out to be more commonly used than heteroradical. This makes me a little sad, but that’s probably just me.

However, I’m cheered by the fact that the abstract little debate about hybrid words seems to have leaked into popular culture, in a post-ironic sort of way. You can now buy the T-shirt:

(Do I need to tell you that polyamory is the practice of maintain several loving sexual relationships simultaneously, with the full knowledge and consent of all involved? I’m sure I don’t.)

ɔɪkəʊˈfjuːʤɪk

Oikofugic: Having a desire to leave home,  an urge to wander or travel

This word was coined in 1904 by the psychologist G. Stanley Hall, in his two-volume opus Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, and Religion. (Given the title, it’s amazing that he managed to hold it down to two volumes.) According to Hall, adolescents were trapped between oikofugic and oikotropic impulses: the desire to leave home on the one hand, and the desire to stay at home on the other. Hall was a great and ponderous coiner of new words. He also described adolescence as being characterized by “a marked decrease of scoliotropism”—that is, a reduced desire to go to school.

Hall seems to have formed his word from the Greek noun oikos, “a household”, and the Latin verb fugere, “to flee”. So it’s one of those Greek-Latin hybrids that made C.P. Scott write, “No good can come of it.”

Oikos also gives us oikology, a fancy name for home economics, and oikonisus, the desire to start a family. Both these words seem to have no actual life beyond featuring in collections of unusual words.

The Greeks called the whole civilized world the oikumene, as if it were one big residence or household. And when the first great gathering of Christian bishops took place at Nicaea in 325 AD, the resulting Council was called oikumenical, because attendance came from all over the (Christian) world. The English word ecumenical still applies to religious gatherings of this sort.

Fugere gives us fleeing words like fugitive, refuge and refugee. The Latin fugax, “fleeting”, is related, and crops up in medical Latin in the form of amaurosis fugax (“transient darkening”), which is a brief loss of vision in one eye; and proctalgia fugax, a transient, severe pain in the rectum.

The suffix -fuge is problematic. When derived from fugere, it has the sense “fleeing from”—as in centrifugal force, which makes objects appear to fly away from the centre of rotation. But medical Latin treated it as being derived from fugare, “to put to flight”. None of the resulting words is in common use today, but we once had febrifuge, a drug that drives away fever; vermifuge, a drug that causes the expulsion of intestinal worms; and dolorifuge, a drug that drives away pain (what we’d now call an analgesic).

The state of being oikofugic should logically be called oikofugia, though this doesn’t seem to be much attested. And someone suffering from oikofugia should be called an oikofuge.

The difficulty, of course, comes from that ambiguity in the suffix -fuge. So an oikofuge could also be interpreted as something that gets rid of oiks.