Search this entire website. Enter word or phrase below. Verbal Rarities Collection # 1 It Pays to Increase Your Word Power is the title of a long-running Reader’s Digest column. But I prefer to crazy-glue a terse codicil to the tail of that title: “It pays to increase your word power with words you will seldom use.” Concerning the pragmatic selection of vocabulary, my public-school teachers hymned in unison the stern injunction to “always use the shorter, clearer word.” Piffle, poppycock and twaddle! My father, my best teacher of English by far, always countered that drab command with his own: “No. Always use the obscure, long-winded word.” Not only will you learn a new word but you will flummox ordained pedagogical authority—to the young learner, life’s most delightful revolt. All this will you accomplish in one word-picking gesture that will befuddle the fuddy-duddies of verbal orthodoxy and befoul their too tidy nest of complacent word selection. Why learn odd words? The acquisition of esoteric vocables limbers up the word tissue in the old noggin, quickens one’s verbal recognition quotient, and lets one strut before the glumly monosyllabic herd one’s innate and ornate word-pride. Snobbery? Mais oui! Thus, from time to time, I propose to share my recondite treasures, both wee words and polysyllabic monstrosities of logorrheic sesquipedalianism. Today the bill of fare and in a sense, the fare of Bill, consists of small words. From the tenebrous realm of obscurity, I now pluck tiny stalwarts to thwart your word power, at the same time that I make it burgeon. A dobdob is a ‘punk monk’ in a Tibetan lamasery (from Tibetan Idob Idob). The bedraggled dobdob is first shown in classes that he is too much the dullard ever to become a learned Buddhist monk. Consequently he is set to perform the lowliest functions of Tibetan monastic life: cleaning from stables the ordure of yaks, policing the more obstreperous lama candidates, and shooting down the criminal element in unruly Tibetan kite-makers. I delight in the reduplicative bliss of the word dikdik. A dikdik is a tiny, dainty-hooved African antelope. Have you heard of the antelopes that leap backwards? The postelope and the retrolope. A dap-dap is a Philippine coral tree (Erythrina indica), the word borrowed into English from one of the great languages of the islands, Tagalog where its form is dapdáp. Some Erythrina species make happy houseplants. Dander consists of minute scales shed from the feathers, hair or skin of animals. Animal dander is often implicated in allergic response syndromes. To daub paint is to slop it on carelessly or quickly. Now, how shall we employ to our general advantage this mixture of obscure and common words? Simple. Use the words above, Class, in an exemplary sentence. The dandered dobdob daubed dikdik doodoo on Dada’s dandy dap-dap. Should that sentence ever describe exactly what you are seeing, you may be certain that you have ingested upon that hour too profuse a variety of controlled substances. Here endeth a tour of the silly side of words for a happy day in spring. Now, students, outdoors you go, to imbibe the al fresco salubrity that awaits under the motley welkin, under the skyey vault of heaven.
Click here to enjoy Part 2 of Verbal Rarities.
© 2007 William Gordon Casselman
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