Floccinaucinihilipilification
This week’s word of the week is a rather grand little (or
should I say grand long) word - floccinaucinihilipilification, which is the
action or habit of describing something as useless, unimportant or worthless.
The word originated in the mid 18th Century, being
popular with Eton pupils and included in the Eton Latin Grammar. The origin of
the word can be traced to four Latin words; flocci, nauci, nihili and pili, all
suggesting “at a small price,” “for nothing,” “trifling” or “something
insignificant”.
Today, floccinaucinihilipilification is rarely used as it
was designed. If you ever hear it in a sentence it is far more likely to be in
an argument about the longest word in the dictionary rather than referring to
something as useless! Just for
information, for all you who thought antidisestablishmentarianism was the
longest word in the English language, with twenty eight letters, floccinaucinihilipilification
beats it coming in with twenty nine! Some
may indeed argue that this is the longest non- technical word to be found in an
English dictionary.
As we have said floccinaucinihilipilification is almost always
used as being an example of a long word, however we can find historical
evidence of its correct usage. The word is first recorded in 1741, in a letter
of William Shenstone, an 18th Century poet and landscape gardener.
Again in the early 19th Century it appears in records from Sir
Walter Scott and the poet Robert Southey.
More recently the word was used by the Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, firstly
in Parliament when discussing alleged corruption among judges in the European Court
of Justice, and again when interviewed by Andrew Neil in February 2012. Really he did, and I can provide empirical
evidence with this little clip from youtube.com!
Okay, so a lot of us have probably learned a new word
today. Perhaps, not a word that is used
in everyday language by everyday people, but as we have seen it is still a word
that is used by at least one MP! If you want to amaze your friends and family
try working floccinaucinihilipilification into a conversation. For those of you who are willing to give it a
go, the pronunciation is FLOK-si-NO-si-NY-HIL-i-PIL-i-fi-KAY-shuhn, but be warned,
you do run the risk of people thinking you swallowed a dictionary for breakfast
or have been eating too much alphabetti spaghetti – lol!
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