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.
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