Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

In what sense is this a word? It's not in any dictionaries (except that German-English one that keeps turning up in the Google hits -- and by the way, it looks like there are only a couple of dozen different sites that have it), it's not used by anyone except the author of that article you linked to (who smugly tosses it out as if it would mean something to anyone else), and if it's somebody's pseudoclassical coinage, it's remarkably ill formed, giving no hint of what it's supposed to mean (does it have something to do with Carians?). Frankly, schadenfreude has much more claim to being an English word; a substantial number of people not only know it but use it in speech expecting it to be understood. I turn my back on "epicaricacy" in disdain.

We had some discussion about this word at Anu Garg's AWAD forum about seven months ago.

I got excited for a minute there, but after the initial query about the alleged word the discussion immediately got onto a pointless sidetrack about why people slow down for accidents and as far as I can see never got back on track. Sigh.

harrumph® to the Hatman. you should have kept reading.

Um, no, AWAD is not the place to go for cutting-edge epistemology. A quick flick through L&S tells us all it's not a real or possible Greek word, so obviously someone's got their letters mixed up... whether last week or three hundred years ago doesn't matter too much.

Nope, it's a real word. You'll find the full dicussion of it in our site; the URL listed below points to the most important part of the discussion thread. From there it was picked up by wwftd's wordmeister, who brought it to AWAD. But the original credit as finder must go to Ammon Shea, as noted in our thread.

My apologies for being so unfamiliar with this site that I cannot give you the links in clickable format.

Epicaricacy:
http://wordcraft.infopop.cc/6/ubb.x?a=tpc&s=441607094&f=932607094&m=7886078523&r=2216042033#2216042033

Wordcraft home page: http://www.wordcraft.infopop.cc/

The etymology has been revealed, but I think moving from Ch to C counts as not being a real word. Epicharicacy I would accept. I actually like coining Greek words, but you have to do it right.

Your more generous than I, Gritchka. I'd don't think that -kaky should yield -cacy.

>I'd don't think that -kaky should yield -cacy.

what is this, a nest or raving prescriptivists??

caco- representing Gr. kako - combining form of bad, evil, forming many
compounds in Greek, some of which, like cacochymy, cacodæmon, cacoethes,
cacophony, have reached English through Latin (and French); others have been
adapted directly from Greek in modern times (as cacology, cacotrophy); others
have been formed on Greek analogies from their elements. Compounds of
Greek and Latin, as cacodorous = malodorous, and the medical cacosomnia
(sleeping badly) are exceptional. Occasionally caco- is used in looser or casual
combination with words of Greek derivation, which may have been modelled on
cacodæmon, as in caco-magician, cacotype. It is very freely used in medical
terminology to form names of bad states of bodily organs, but most of these are
not English in form, e.g. cacogalactia (a condition in which the milk is bad),
cacoglossia (putrid state of the tongue), cacomorphia (malformation or
deformity), caconychia (morbid state of the nails), cacopharyngia (a putrid
condition of the pharynx), cacophthalmia (malignant inflammation of the eyes),
cacoplasia (formation of diseased structures from a depraved condition of the
system), cacopneumonia, cacorrhachitis (disease of the vertebral column),
cacothymia (disordered state of mind), cacotrichia (disease of the hair), etc.

what is this, a nest or [sic] raving prescriptivists?

Not really. I just didn't think that -kaky going to -cacy was aestheitcally pleasing. Schadenfreude just has a nice ring to it.

You might want to have a look-see at this.

>what is this, a nest or [sic] raving prescriptivists?

oh, I know... but this venue don' seem to have no edit feature, do it?!

I'm glad that tdw pointed me back to this discussion; at last I discover the (tainted) etymology of this pseudo-word. There are two separate issues here, etymological and (if you will) epistemological. A word can be a perfectly good word while having a totally screwed-up etymology (eg, television). Conversely, a word can be fine etymologically but not exist as a genuine English word (logoclopy could mean 'plagiarism,' but doesn't). This has a bad etymology and is also not a word: nobody uses it.

I'm hardly a scholar in such matters but I would say that the words in Bailey's Dictionary are rarely hapax, imaginary or inkhorns.

Depends how you define "rarely"; in this case all three could be applied. Bailey's "epicharikaky" gets exactly two Google hits, one to this thread and one to the wordcraft link. It is an imaginary inkhorn word used once (hapax) by Bailey and plucked forth centuries later (with slightly, and ignorantly, modified spelling) by someone who likes obscure inkhorn terms. Nothing wrong with that, but it's not a word in any sense that makes sense to me. The words of English are the words used by English speakers, and no English speaker has ever used this word other than artificially (citing it in language threads). As I said earlier in this thread, schadenfreude has far greater claim to English-word status.

I have at least traced this strange word back to its Greek form: epichairikakia meaning schadenfreude. It's used in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (1107a1) twice. On the web I found a Google hit saying it was used in Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, but I haven't tracked it down yet. Still haven't figured how it got transmogrified into Bailey's word. I think it's an example of an inkhorn word, misspelled and copied by modern-day hard-word lexicographers.