Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

polysyllabic humour

John, the genial proprietor of the Discouraging Word, and I have been trading emails back and forth, mainly about long words in English. He is far more diligent than I at posting his excellent lexicographical observations as blog entries (two on 26 July and one on 28 July, no permalinks). I've been putting this entry off for several days now, until tracking down the reference that I vaguely alluded to in one of my emails (quoted in part at TDW). I had remembered running across honorificabilitudinitatibus for the first time after having been introduced to the second edition of Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage by the librarian in high school. The word is first cited in Giovanni Balbi's late 13th century Latin dictionary Summa grammaticalis quæ vocatur Catholicon, first printed by Gutenberg or one of his school. I had a somewhat muddled memory of this word, most famously used in Love's Labours Lost, and had subsequently confused it with a humorous Churchillian quotation that used terminological inexactitude as a synonym for lie. (I now think that I ran across this word for the first time elsewhere.) A short entry on inexactitude in Fowler's Usage cross-referenced to a longer one on polysyllabic humour lead me finally to the entry on pedantic humour which in itself exhibits the tendency it ostensibly prohibits.

No essential distinction is intended between [pendantic humour] and polysyllabic humour; one or the other name is more appropriate to particular specimens, and the two headings are therefore useful for reference. But they are manifestations of the same impulse, and the few remarks needed may be made here for both. A warning is necessary, because we have all of us, except the abnormally stupid, been pedantic humourists in our own time. We spend much of our childhood picking up a vocabulary; we like to air our latest finds; we discover that our elders are tickled when we come out with a new name that they thought beyond us; we devote some pains to tickle them further, and there we are, pedants and polysyllabicisits all. The impulse is healthy for children, and nearly universal — which is just why warning is necessary; for among so many there will always be some who fail to realize that the clever habit applauded at home will make them insufferable abroad. Most of those who are capable of writing well enough to find readers do learn sooner or later that playful use of long or learned words is a one-sided game boring the reader more than it pleases the writer, that the impulse to it is a danger-signal — for there must be something wrong with what they are saying if it needs recommending by such puerilities — and that yielding to the impulse is a confession of failure. But now and then even an able writer will go on believing that the incongruity between simple things to be said and out-of-the-way words to say them in has a perennial charm. Perhaps it has for the reader who never outgrows hobbledehoyhood; but for the rest of us it is dreary indeed. It is possible that acquaintance with such labels as pedantic and polysyllabic humour may help to shorten the time it takes to cure a weakness incident to youth.

[Addendum 07/29/03: Google revealed another entry citing Fowler's pedantic humour]

Posted by jim at July 28, 2003 01:35 PM | TrackBack