Back-Pedaling on Those Foot-and-a-Half-Long Words

My column on big words has provoked considerable response, both pro and con.

First, con. Irmgard Lenel of Santa Monica takes me to task for using the word sesquipedalianisms without defining it. “Do you seriously believe,” she asks, “that most of your readers know what sesquipedalianisms are?”

Well, if they didn’t know, they do now, since I assume they will have looked it up. Anyway, they could have figured it out with a little Latin. Sesqui means one and a half, and ped means foot. Thus, sesquipedalianism means, among other things, a word that is a foot and a half long.

Jack Levitt of Santa Ana, a retired doctor, says that in defining acetabulum as “the cup-shaped sucker of a cuttlefish,” I overlooked its primary meaning: “the cup-shaped socket of the hip joint, into which the thigh bone fits.”

Making the same point, A. Ross of Fillmore, also a doctor, suggests that I may have been the only person in my high school class that failed both bonehead biology and dumdum Latin. In common use, he says, the acetabulum is “the shallow depression of the os innominatum that receives the capitulum of the femur.”

“Acetabulum is your hip joint!” writes Pamela B. Frasier, getting to the point, “and I sincerely hope you keep yours oiled.”

Betty Jensen of Beverly Hills says I erred in the clause “an esoteric group of pedants,” pointing out that “the word esoteric means ‘known only to the initiated,’ and it therefore refers to a subject and not a person.”

She is right. I should have said erudite .

Fred A. Glienna of South Pasadena faults my word choice in writing “one needn’t know big words to say whatever he means,” insisting that in all such constructions the he should be one , to avoid confusion about the identity of he . He says, “I think the rules of constancy are clear on this, fine hair though it may be.”

The sainted H. W. Fowler devotes a page to “one . . . one” versus “one . . . he,” finally ruling for “one . . . one,” though he cites several examples of “one . . . he” or “one . . . his.”

My junior college English teacher zapped me for writing “one . . . one” in an essay, pointing out that one is a rather precious word to begin with and that its serial use in a sentence is nauseating. (“One should watch one’s manners and one’s words.”) I agree with her. But everyone to everyone’s own opinion.

Sue Kamm is distressed that a reader complained about my use of seascapes, clamorous, brio, proscenium arch, denizens, hirsute and jousted as being too big for the average reader. “Perhaps your reader went to school where language was not part of the curriculum. In any high school worthy of being accredited, students should have learned the words listed--or if they didn’t, they should know how to use a dictionary.”

Glienna also comments on this: “I don’t understand the candor, or perhaps it’s arrogance, of someone who trumpets his confusion at (such) simple words. . . . But this is a nation of people, sometimes omnipresent, who positively boast of what they don’t know.”

Grace Williams of Rolling Hills Estates questions my use of overly in defining the word ailurophile as “overly fond of cats.” She says, “Where did you get the overly ? I have several friends who are cat fanciers and I would hate to think they are overly attached to the creatures.”

Actually, the book I was quoting from (“The Superior Persons Second Book of Weird and Wondrous Words”) defined ailurophile as “someone who is abnormally fond of cats.” Besides, in my view any person who is fond of cats is overly fond of cats, at least, though I wouldn’t go so far as to call them abnormal.

Ms. Williams advises me, incidentally, that the word for dog lover is cynophilist , in case you ever need it.

Jack Gilmore of Fullerton recalls an old joke about Noah Webster. Noah and his secretary are caught in flagrante delicto by Mrs. Webster, who says, “Noah! I’m surprised!” Noah says, “No, my dear. We are surprised. You are amazed.”

I’ve heard that story before. though the principal wasn’t Webster. It might have been H. W. Fowler. It doesn’t matter much who it was. The point is, as Mark Twain said, “the difference between the right word and the almost right word is like the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” Actually, I think the word amazed in Gilmore’s version of the joke is a lightning bug. Outraged would be more like lightning.

Laura Allen, a medical transcriptionist, says she recently discovered the word witzelsucht , which means, she says, “a mental condition characteristic of frontal lobe lesions and marked by the making of poor jokes and puns and the telling of pointless stories, at which the patient himself is intensely amused.

“Sound like anyone you know?”

Whom? Me?