Mz. Language Person: Pop Quiz
Quick! What do the following words mean?
bellipotent
allochroous
brontophilia (the link is for the opposite)
tutling
allicient
barbelate
barratrous
cacophrenic
borachio
ecdysiast
covinous
antelucan
acherontic
Give up? (Hint: click on the links.)
To my mind, they are evidence that either David Brin was out of his ever-lovin’ gourd when writing a part of his book “The Uplift War”, or his editor was. OmegaMom (aka Mz. Language Person) encountered these words in the space of 32 pages in that book; she actually had to revert to the college mindset and haul out the highlighter to mark each word.
Now, admittedly, I do know one of them (ecdysiast), and a bunch of them I could figure out because, due solely to my upbringing and an eight-year stint with first-year French, I have an awesome grasp of Latin roots. (For instance: Cacophrenic–think of “cacophonous”, discordant/ugly music, and “phrenology”, the “science” of studying the shape of the skull. From those two words, I get cacophrenic equals a damned ugly skull, and, given the context of that word, it fits.)
But four of them I couldn’t even find on my handy-dandy link to Dictionary.com
WHY??? Why on earth would any writer use words like these? Why would any editor let them pass by, when they jar the reader out of the rhythm of the work, into a cold, cruel world where the Oxford English Dictionary is not a delightful luxury, but a dire necessity?
This slew of odd words puzzles me, because I’ve been reading Brin’s books lately, and none of the other ones had this infusion of erudition. In fact, they pop up in only one chapter, and a few other chapters here and there. It’s so damned out-of-place that it makes me wonder if two people were writing this book, or if Brin just dropped them in as a joke.
(On a little googling research, I discover that Brin had a “classical education”, so perhaps to him these words weren’t jarring.)
(If any of you knows what “tutling” means, please let me know.)
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