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Saturday, 28 July 2007
Calling all crisrixians

If you put "crisrixian" into Google, it asks: "Do you mean Christian?" You probably don't, but it isn't for me to say. "Crisrixian" is Hugh's "signature word", not mine, and can be seen in action here. 

What is a signature word? Ben McIntyre explains, and argues that everyone should have one:

"ALMOST EVERY DAY I GO FOR A RUN down the bemerded pavements of North London,” Boris Johnson declared, announcing his candidature for London Mayor. Bemerded? We knew that he must mean fouled by dogs, but the word brought the reader up short for a moment, just as Johnson intended.

The word “bemerded” does not appear in the OED. Run it through Google and you get just 264 hits, most of them related to Boris himself, and the inquiry “Did you mean: bearded?” “Bemerded” appears in a translation of Rabelais, in a play by the weird occultist Aleister Crowley and a recent article by Christopher Hitchens. It has appeared in The Times only once in 222 years, as far as I can ascertain digitally, in a theatre review by Irving Wardle in 1989. Will Self managed to use it in 2001 when discussing the possible links between childlessness and avant-garde anomie: “It is hard to maintain the ultimate futility and purposeless of existence when you’re confronting a packet of wet ones and bemerded little bum.” That familiar old Nietzsche and the Nappies theory.

But mostly “bemerded” is a word that Boris has made his own. He has used it to describe the streets of Brussels, the streets of England, the streets of Islington and the Oxford cell floor where he spent the night after an evening boozing with the Bullingdon Club. And he was going to get it into his first official statement as mayoral candidate by hook or by crook. Rightly, for bemerded is his signature word, being at once slightly risqué in an antique way, gently self-mocking, and also rather clever.

Everyone should have a signature word.

[...]

"Part of the enjoyment of collecting unusual words is going on to use them in everyday conversation,” writes Christopher Foyle, in the introduction to Foyle’s Philavery: A Treasury of Unusual Words. A philavery is “an idiosyncratic collection of uncommon and pleasing words”, and few are better placed to be philaverists (I think I may have made that one up) than Foyle, the third generation of his family to operate Foyle’s bookshop in Charing Cross Road.

Foyle’s collection is splendidly bizarre, running from “abacinate”, meaning “to blind someone by putting red hot metal before their eyes” (the only recorded use of which is the lyrics of the 1986 song Angel of Death by the American thrash metal band Slayer) to “zoonist”, “someone who believes that nature as whole or natural objects are living beings”.

[...]

There is a tendency in public discourse to avoid uncommon words, for fear that they will sound pretentious. George Orwell’s prescription on writing simply has evolved into a refusal to write anything beyond the ken of the spell-checker, while politicians stick firmly to the well-trodden paths of vocabulary.

But before we hail Boris as the first political philaverist of modern times, let us pay tribute to John Prescott, who did not merely use words nobody else understood, but invented an entire language of his own.

Both in public and in private, I avoid the word "discourse", which for me is tainted with postmodernism and structuralism. I'm not sure whether it is a crisrixian word. I assume crisrixian refers to Christopher Ricks, who I think was at Cambridge at the time of McCabegate and who, as far as I know, is not a fan of structuralism and related nonsense. But I can't honestly say I know what it means, and Hugh will certainly not explain it.

As for my own signature word, as far as I know I'm the only person to use "binthood" in my discussion of the "dozy binthood" of western muslimahs. I hesitate to claim to have invented this term for fear of being googlethwarted. 

Posted on 9:57 AM by Mary Jackson
Comments
28 Jul 2007
Hugh Fitzgerald

The word  "crisrixian" is nothing more than the invented insect of an hour, prompted by a temporary  need to describe the tribe of those who are deeply, even at times worshipfully, attentive to the words of Bob Dylan. It has no other uses, save one joking appearance to identify the author of "Keats and Embarrasment," who is disinctly unblushing, even when asking Samuel Beckett to autograph a briefcase's worth of his books, one after the other -- and Beckett kindly complied. But that's about it. Not meant for general circulation.

But "polypragmonic" -- from "polypragmosyne" -- might, according to your definition, fit. Or "vectensian." Or several others that appear with similar unwonted frequency.

 



29 Jul 2007
Send an emailMary Jackson

attentive to the words of Bob Dylan

I don't really get that, at least not in this context, but then I don't really get Bob Dylan.

I'm not sure "polypragmonic" fits as you didn't invent that. "Vectensian"? Possibly, but I don't know what it means, and I bet nobody else does either.

I think a "signature word" should be more readily comprehensible, like Boris Johnson's "bemerded".



29 Jul 2007
Hugh Fitzgerald

"Polypragmosyne" exists in Greek, and I have already given -- possibly at another retrievable place --  the reference to the article about it in the anthology by Michael Crawford and David Whitehead, "Archaic and Classical Greece." But while the concept, the "busybodiness," comes up elsewhere -- for example in William Arrowsmith's discussion of Aristophanes appended to his own translation of "The Birds" (it might be found in a back issue of "Arion"), a feat even more remarkable than the version by John Hookham Frere -- I don't think anyone has Englished "polypragmosyne" -- and certainly not presented it in the adjectival form "polypragmonic" -- as I have. Unless other evidence is presented, I claim the English (non-tolfraedic -- another possible "signature word" ) oinage.

"Vectensian" for god's sake is simple, and everyone on the Isle of Wight knows what the word means. It comes from the Latin (recall, please, the section on "Romans in Britain" in the history syllabus -- or has that too fallen out?) "Vectensum." I possess a volume of Vectensian verse; that's its title: "Vectensian Verse." The high point, naturally, is Keats in his temporary villeggiatura on what it would be wrong to call the English Martha's Vineyard or Ile de Re, but it at least it is an island. I can't remember what he wrote while staying there -- possibly "Endymion."
 

So, while "vectensian" is not mine,  I like the word, I like its sound. Lugdunum. Mediolanum. And Vectensum. Long live the Roman Empire, or what's left of it.



29 Jul 2007
Send an emailMary Jackson

It isn't simple at all - it's really obscure and I bet next to nobody knows what it means.

I think a signature word should be an amusing coinage, but it should be accessible - being archane is not enough.

But perhaps you did indeed coin "polypragmonic". "Polypragmon", however, was coined not by you but by an Australian called Bruce:

Once a polypragmon
Camped by a billabong...

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