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’.
Disagree with half of it, enjoy reading all of it
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