I went back to work today, as one is often wont to do on a Monday. It was a fairly typical day, capped by a trio of conference planning meetings, including one for a conference I’m actually attending in Boston, in March. Nothing really out of the ordinary.
I note with some amusement that today, according to my Forgotten English desk calendar, is the Feast Day of St. John Bosco, “a 19th-century Italian patron of editors.” The calendar page goes on to talk about so-called inkhorn terms, “pedantic expressions which ‘smell of the lamp.'”
The extreme inkhornism, “honorificabilitudinitatibus,” a monstrosity unleashed in Thomas Nashe’s Lenten Stuff (1599) meaning “worthiness of honor,” was once considered the longest English word. But in the late 1700s it was surpassed by the abomination, “floccinaucinihilipilification,” deeming something to be worthless.
