From last week’s issue of the Times Literary Supplement , comes this amusing note on words and wordiness: “Each reissue of a dictionary is accompanied by a press release intended to alert journalists to new words and phrases. While some are likely to stick around . . . most will whither unlamented: Aerobicize , celbutante , retronym , e-Baying .”
“More interesting,” writes TLS , are “words that never made it. Johnson’s Dictionary , for example, offered effumability , the capacity to be converted into vapour, an expression which would come in handy in literary criticism—”Mr. X’s poetry is rich in effumability, if nothing else . . . ”
One can only imagine the state of modern poetry, had the critical force of effumability been unleashed at the dawn of the Romantic age. A few more words, deserving resurrection or rehabilitation, are as follows: ” honey-fuggle : to obtain by deception; bloviate : to talk pompously; hugsome : someone who can be hugged; immoment : unimportant; baggegery : the rabble; jolliment : merriment; malt-worm : a drunkard.”
But I’ll stop there, lest I weasel my way into the bloviating coterie of philologians.
