One ripple effect of the death of Queen Elizabeth II was a minor uptick in Google searches for the word catafalque.
Unfortunately, the global news media failed to pick up on this riveting development.
Those organisations thereby missed the opportunity to interview me as a fascinating counterexample: a rare member of the public who was already familiar with the word and its definition.
I recorded catafalque in my journal a year or so earlier, as part of my ongoing effort to record and learn all unfamiliar words.
However, there was only fleeting satisfaction in knowing the name of the raised platform supporting our departed monarch.
As I pointed out in part one of this series, the decades I’ve spent expanding my vocabulary have, in reality, left me in possession of a large amount of useless – or dimly remembered – words.
So now I’m attempting to bring some order to the past two years of concerted word hunting.
These are the spoils of that audit: redundant words and trivial words, words I learned twice, words I can never remember and words that I can’t pronounce.
The Utterly Useless Words
As with some facts, some words aren’t even worth learning, let alone wasting precious time transcribing.
Life is surely too short to know the difference between alluvial and fluvial. But that didn’t stop me writing both terms into my word list.
Such words are interesting only because they are novel. After a while, I pledged to cut down on recording these obscurities.
That effort failed conspicuously, as evidenced by the following examples.
Do I really need to know that qiviut is musk ox wool, or that sphagnum is a type of peat moss?
Why would I ever need to find the querencia in a bullring, or understand what ullage is?
I don’t plan to attend any curling tournaments, so why does it matter that such a competition is a bonspiel?
Also, who has a chapbook these days? And who knows what a roneo machine is?
Apparently, on some level, I do.
Here’s the most damning indictment of all: I now know that popliteal means the area behind one’s knee.
The Unloved Sibling Words
These are arguably a subset of the Utterly Useless words: words that mean the same thing as a more common cousin.
Decades ago I learned that ‘shindy’ means the same thing as shindig. But whenever I’ve used this legitimate alternative since, people nevertheless correct me.
So where is the utility in using abysm instead of abyss, swart for swarthy or exody in place of exodus?
All these words seem obsolescent.
Or obsolete.
The Stunt Words
Initially you might mistake these as yet more Utterly Useless words, but these have considerable value to me as trivia.
To state things honestly: I like being among the minority of nerds who know these words.
Just as I take pride in knowing that the statue in Piccadilly Circus is actually of Anteros (not Eros), knowing the difference between a serenade and an aubade fills me with a radiating smugness.
Highest among stunt words is immarcescible, an adjective that was replaced in the 1662 revision of The Book of Common Prayer because it was seen as obscure.
When I learned there was a word considered too abstruse for a 17th century liturgical text, I knew instantly that I had to adopt it.
And hey, did you know that another name for the hash symbol (#) is the octothorpe?
Of course you didn’t, because you’re probably normal.
In fact, these days most people seem to refer to # as a ‘hashtag’, when a hashtag is actually the hash symbol plus the word or phrase being cross-referenced.
And pointing out that discrepancy makes you a bore. The same type of bore who would know the word octothorpe.
The Words I Forgot I Already Knew
A sense of futility began to set when I thumbed through a diary from some 15 years ago. Here I found documentary evidence of my faulty lexical memory.
I logged definitions for the words mephitic and gallimaufrey during the same week in early December 2007.
Yet these words reappeared in my journal in 2020, as if we’d never met before.
(This feeling of living in a futile self-improvement loop is exacerbated by the fact that the same 2007 diary contains an entry about the disposal of a dead bird, and that incident inspired a blog post about how my life is trapped in a recursive furrow.)
Looking even further back, I realised that other recent additions such as passel, minatory and amanuensis appeared more than two decades earlier, in the word-of-the-day journal I maintained while at university.
I can only hope that, after another 20 years, my memory will improve.
The Slippery Words
These are some words I simply cannot seem to remember, even after revisiting them multiple times.
A case in point: I forgot the meaning of embrocation between looking at the definition in my journal and looking back up to the monitor to type the word out.
Why does this happen?
To start with, many words are struggling against categorisation issues. Some of them are apparently too close to other, more familiar words to gain their own foothold.
Although the words mean something fundamentally different, duenna shares too many qualities with doula to avoid confusion.
They start and end with the same letters, contain a rounded vowel and describe an experienced woman who provides support to another (often younger) woman.
A rapporteur isn’t the same as a reporter, but there is sufficient semantic overlap in role and pronunciation that it seems a waste of ink to have recorded the definition.
Similarly the quality of being importunate is close to, but not the same, as that of being impudent
Meanwhile, depredation is competing with degradation and deprivation, and immanent is too close to imminent.
By contrast, a minority of words go off in a totally misleading direction.
A mendicant sounds like someone with a mendacious bent, but it means a beggar.
Panglossian is closer in meaning to pollyannaish, but it is sufficiently close to polyglot to create an incorrect association with multilingualism.
This represents the tip of the lexical iceberg.
There are many other words that just don’t stick, for one reason or another (including, ironically, manqué).
The list goes on: antimacassar, arrogate, cartouche, exiguous, picayune, philippic, prolix, prophylaxis, roué, supererogatory, suzerain, sinecure, spruik, supererogatory, syncope, teleology
The Unpronounceable Words
Trust me, you feel awfully clever after learning a new word. That is, until you try to use it in conversation. Then you can find yourself on very thin linguistic ice.
I think my first encounter with this phenomenon was reading the word ‘hyperbolic’ in the early 1990s – it was the name of a local rave promoter, which appeared prominently on flyers at the time.
I eventually found my way back to the originating noun, hyperbole. Obviously this is quite a useful word to add to your vocabulary, but I initially pronounced it as hyper-bowl, as if describing a knock-off rival to America’s biggest sporting event.
These days, even when I do get a tricky pronunciation right – pronouncing analogous with a ‘hard’ g, rhyming swathe with cloth – I still feel a little unsteady.
So how am I going to cope with a word like lorgnette?
Then again, why on earth would I ever have to say that word aloud?
Next time: bawdy words, pretend words, and a German’s verdict on Teutonic loanwords
