obolary
adj. poor or impecunious
inopious
adj. lacking wealth or resources; needy
ptochocracy
n. government by the poor
Language
In a Word
macrobian
adj. long-lived
annosity
n. fullness of years, length of life, agedness
Index entries from A. Lapthorn Smith’s How to Be Useful and Happy From Sixty to Ninety, 1922:
Absurdity of voluntary retirement at sixty
Adding ten years to life
Alcohol as cure for insomnia, very bad
All day in garden
Beard, long white, don’t wear
Carriage and pair shortens life
Cause of insomnia must be found
Cook, good, source of danger to elderly men
Crime to die rich
Engine drivers over sixty, what to do with them
Garrett, Mrs., of Penge, active voter at 102
If no relatives, spend on poor
Young people, company of, at sixty, how to keep
An Untranslatable Poem
In his 1983 book En Torno a la Traducción, Spanish philologist and translator Valentín García Yebra cites a Portuguese poem by Cassiano Ricardo entitled “Serenata sintética”:
rua
torta
lua
morta
tua
porta.
Broadly, it’s an image of an evening tryst, but its import is so embedded in its language that García Yebra found himself unable to convey it in another tongue.
“In this short poem, phonemic form is everything,” write Basil Hatim and Ian Mason in Discourse and the Translator. “The words themselves are evocative: a small town with ‘winding streets’ (rua torta), a ‘fading moon’ (lua morta) and the hint of an amorous affair: ‘your door’ (tua porta). But their impact is achieved almost solely through the close rhyme and rhythm; the meaning is raised from the level of the banal by dint of exploiting features which are indissociable from the Portuguese language as a code.
“García Yebra relates that he gave up the attempt to translate the poem even into Spanish, a language which shares certain phonological features with Portuguese.”
In a Word
juvencle
n. a young girl
minauderie
n. a coquettish manner or air
increpation
n. a chiding, reproof, or rebuke
porporate
adj. clad in purple
Testing Tongues
Applicants for radio announcing jobs in the 1920s had to a pass a diction test — New York Daily News radio critic Ben Gross gives this example in his 1954 book I Looked and I Listened:
“Penelope Cholmondely raised her azure eyes from the crabbed scenario. She meandered among the congeries of her memoirs. There was the Kinetic Algernon, a choleric artificer of icons and triptychs, who wanted to write a trilogy. For years she had stifled her risibilities with dour moods. His asthma caused him to sough like the zephyrs among the tamarack.”
In the 1940s Radio Central New York administered a cold reading to prospective radio personalities to assess their speaking ability — announcer Del Moore found it so entertaining that he gave it to his friend Jerry Lewis, who made it a staple of his annual muscular dystrophy telethon:
In a Word
titivil
n. “Name for a devil said to collect fragments of words dropped, skipped, or mumbled in the recitation of divine service, and to carry them to hell, to be registered against the offender.” [OED]
In a Word
linguished
adj. skilled in language
logofascinated
adj. fascinated by words
logodaedaly
n. cunning in words; “verbal legerdemain”
oligoglottism
n. limited knowledge of languages
Noted
In North Wales the Welsh word for ‘now’ is ‘rwan.’ In South Wales it is ‘rwan’ spelt backwards, viz., ‘nawr.’ It is conjectured that the first North Walian who made use of the word was standing on his head at the time, and that his pronunciation became general.
— The Cambrian, May 1901
In a Word
micropsychy
n. faint-heartedness
abulia
n. an inability to act decisively
quakebuttock
n. a coward
In a Word
gynophagite
n. an eater of women
androphagous
adj. eating men
brephophagist
n. one who eats babies