Gideon J. (9th Grade)

“It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn’t use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like ‘What about lunch?’”

–Winnie-the-Pooh

I love words. I love encountering a new word, especially one with an abnormal or oddly specific meaning, or some ridiculous word with a really fun sound to it. One of my foremost hobbies is to record unfamiliar words I notice in books I read, or lemmata I find while exploring an online dictionary or our Oxford English tome. 

Thus, for a few years now, I’ve transferred words written on random pieces of paper or pocket notebooks to a Google Doc that has, at my most recent count, some thirteen hundred and sixty-four words, ranging from those I should certainly already know to a smattering of the rarest, most dated, most archaic, most obsolete words that exist (two examples are expergefactor, something that wakes someone up in the morning; and tibicinate, to play on a flute).

Unfortunately for Winnie-the-Pooh and anyone else who is hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobic, some of my favorite words include pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, floccinaucinihilipilification, and honorificabilitudinitatibus (a hapax legomenon that appeared in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost). I also enjoy less sesquipedalian words like ‘melliferous’ and ‘peristeronic’; the former means “yielding or producing honey,” and the latter means “suggestive of pigeons.” Yes, suggestive of pigeons. As if we’re just going to step outside one day and look around and say, “Hmm, this place looks peristeronic!”

In addition, my brain often retains knowledge, possibly sometimes inaccurately, that relates to the etymologies of random words. My family may have recently realized this after I accurately elucidated the etymologies of the words penguin and adder, both of which come from Welsh. I can even tell you random facts about words derived from Latin or old English, like how the word ‘squirrel’ comes, via Old French, from the Latin diminutive of a word that the Romans themselves borrowed from the Greeks, which was originally a combination of the words for ‘shade’ and ‘tail’ (although that I looked up in order to ensure that my facts were straight). 

As a testimony to my knowledge of etymological trivia, I can tell a short anecdote: the majority of this summer we spent on furlough, mostly staying at our aunt and uncle’s house in Wisconsin. One day during this period of time, my aunt walked into a room where I was reading on a couch and asked me whether I was feeling melancholy (since the room had no other occupants and my siblings and cousins were probably playing in the basement). After observing the blank look on my face, she explained the word’s meaning, assuming that that was what had bemused me. I responded by telling her that I had merely been distracted after remembering that ‘melancholy’ came from two Ancient Greek words, meaning ‘black’ and ‘bile’, which had also effected a Latin calque of the same meaning from which we derive our English word, atrabilious (meaning ‘melancholy or ill-tempered’). 

So, learning random, primarily useless words and their backgrounds is my hobby. I have unfortunately misled other people into believing that I have actually retained a plethora of useful words in my lexicon, which is false. And yet, learning about new words is still my favourite hobby.