Mind your language | 11 June 2011

A labour of love of the strangest kind, published posthumously, came to me this week. It is The English Wordsmith, by David Andrews (£12.99), which is nothing but 8,000 ‘important, relevant, obscure, difficult, unusual words and phrases’. He doesn’t list Shakespeare’s honorificabilitudinitatibus, but he does include floccinaucinihilipilification, presumably because of its unusual length, defining it as ‘the action of contemptuously dismissing something, or treating it, as worthless’. I wanted to know more.

The OED notes that its earliest known use is by William Shenstone (whom I have never read) in a letter from 1741, and that it derives from ‘a well-known rule of the Eton Latin Grammar’ that includes the words flocci, nauci, nihili, pili. It might have been well-known to the dictionary makers, but not to the countless websites today that discuss the word. Many transpose the phrase ‘well-known’ to apply to the Eton Latin Grammar, though there is no evidence they know anything about this either. New media: new ignorance.

The Eton grammar descended from grammars by the first master of St Paul’s School in London, William Lily (1468–1522), which he compiled in collaboration with Erasmus and John Colet. A conflated edition came out in 1549. Edward VI and Elizabeth I decreed it the only authorised grammar in the kingdom. Its main structure endured, and in 1758 a revised edition appeared as The Eton Latin Grammar.

In search of the ‘well-known rule’, I found in the London Library an edition from 1825, with a frontispiece boasting a lion and a unicorn and an ‘Advertisement’ declaring that S. Buckley and T. Longman had purchased ‘the Royal Grant and Privilege of printing Lily’. I wonder if the claim had any standing in law. In any case, the rule appeared in the section on syntax, under the heading ‘Genitivus post verbum’ (I tremble to trespass on Peter Jones’s territory).