Sesquipedalian Buckley Part I

I was reading a copy of National Review this week and came across the following in a review by Mona Charon of a book about William F. Buckley (the title of which begins with “Athwart History” and ends with “Omnibus” 14 words later:

Bill Buckley is perhaps best remembered as the leading sesquipedalian columnist in America. Though this became fodder for late-night comedy and even a Disney movie portrayal, it’s worth pausing to consider the sniper-like precision with which he deployed his prodigious vocabulary….Describing Oliver North’s star turn before the congressional committee investigating Iran/Contra, he noted that a minority of viewers came away determined to punish North’s “contumacious bravura.” That sums it up.
Your humble reviewer confesses that she cheerfully turned to the dictionary several times in the course of reading these essays and learned that “supernal” means celestial or heavently (Bill Buckley knew a lot of words about heaven), that “anaphora” refers to the rhetorical device of repeating the same phrase at the beginning of several verses, sentences, or paragraphs (used in reference to Jesse Jackson), and that “velleity” is the lowest level of volition. “Psephologists” study election returns.
Do you know what a “palinode” is? No, it’s not a paean to the former governor of Alaska….Webster’s had is. “1: An ode or song recanting or retracting something in an earlier poem. 2: a formal retraction.”

Let’s begin to inspect the words from this short excerpt. It will take all of this week.

Sesquipedalian – while I mentioned it on Jan. 3, along with its transmogrified (see Mar. 17 blog) form hyperpolysyllabicsesquipedalianist, I’ve never gone through the research on it that I do with most words. I also reread the blog from Sept. 1 and to my surprise I didn’t even make reference to it there. The word has quite a distinguished history, having been used by Horace in his Ars Poetica, a poetic treatise on poetry. In lines 96-97 you find the phrase containing the first known use of the word:

…cum pauper et exul uterque

proicit ampullas et sesquipedalia uerba,

The phrase, for those of you not fluent in Latin, was translated in 2005 by A.S. Kline as:

One exiled, one a beggar, lament in common prose,

Eschewing bombast, and sesquipedalian words,

And Latin was good enough for people until 1615, when it was first used in English. The Latin word comes from two words: sesqui- and pes. Sesqui- is a prefix meaning 50% more, and pes is the Latin word for the length of a foot. So the literal translation is “foot-and-a-half” and in Horace’s use refers to uerba, or words, so it is a foot-and-a-half long adjective used to describe foot-and-a-half long words.

Horace’s tongue-in-cheek usage is the same way it is used today. And if you really want to express the pedantry (see Jan. 18 blog) of long words, add prefixes like hyper- (over, beyond, extra) and poly- (many, a lot), to syllabic (referring to syllables) and combine it with sesquipedalian to get an even longer word describing long words, hyperpolysyllabicsesquipedalian.

On Wednesday we’ll get to other words from the review of Buckley’s essays. Stay tuned.