Superior Words: From Kallikak to Nullibiety

The word kallikak is neither in Bowler's book on the Superior Person's Book of Words nor in the OED, but it appears in the Unabridged and has a fascinating story behind it. It was a pseudonymous name given to a family by the psychologist who studied the family--Henry Goddard (1866-1957), an eminent psychologist of the early 20th century. Goddard was a great believer in the theory of eugenics, which was all the rage 100 years ago. Eugenics was a theory which taught that moral characteristics, as well as intelligence and looks, were heritable. He studied a woman in a NJ hospital for the "feeble-minded" and decided to trace her lineage back several generations. He gave the name Kallikak to the family, made up of two Greek words meaning "good" and "bad," because he found (or his research assistants claimed to discover) that people on one side of her family tended to be "normal" but on another side they tended to be "feeble-minded." How did this happen? Goddard was said to have traced the origin of feeble-mindedness into the family through an illicit liaison between the progenitor of the clan and a feeble-minded young woman around the time of the Revolutionary War. He later married and fathered a "normal" brood, but those who came from the union of the earliest "Kallikak" and the feeble-minded young woman were, almost without exception, feeble-minded. With this kind of "research" buttressing his claim, Goddard argued not only for institutions to isolate and serve the feebleminded but also for social policies that would prevent propagation of the feeble-minded (such as forced sterilization). The movement was going "great guns" in the US until a little experiment in Europe called National Socialism tended to give it a bad name. This word, then, not only has an interesting sound to it, but it illustrates something about the history of a discipline held in fairly high regard today. What was science 100 years ago would be considered quackery today.

Cacophemism/Dysphemism

We can't let the history of scholarship, intriguing as it is, deter us from continuing our journey into words. Cacophemism, which again doesn't appear in the OED (or the Unabridged, for that matter) means the same thing as dysphemism, which is the opposite of euphemism. That is, a cacophemism is a pejorative expression used in place of a mild one. One could say "quack" instead of doctor; "egghead" instead of professor, "shrink" instead of psychologist, "ambulance chaser" instead of lawyer, etc. Euphemisms are generally in more abundant supply in our conversation: sanitation engineer for trash collector, downsizing the company for firing employees, praying to the porcelain alter rather than puking into the toilet. Lots of good words here, so let's move on.

Caducity/Caducous

Caducity has nothing to do with an object known as the caduceus. A caduceus was a wand carried by an ancient Greek or Roman herald, but it points back further into history because it was the wand carried by Hermes (Mercury) as the messenger of the gods. It is represented with two snakes twined around it. But caducity/caducous come from a different root--the Latin verb cadere, meaning "to fall." Something that falls, such as a leaf from a tree, is also seen to be "fleeing" from its earlier position; thus caducous can also imply a condition that is fleeting or temporary. It can also refer to infirmities of old age or senility. Thus, one could speak of the caducity of language, or the caducity of nature. I especially was delighted to see a historical-legal significance to caducous; it means the lapse, or failure, of a testamentary gift. From 1880: "The lapsed share becomes caducous, and falls to those persons named in the testament who happen to have children." That this usage is not modern is proven by a reference to teh ancient Rmoan lawyer Ulpian: "A testamentary gift which...he to whom it was left had failed to take, although so left that according to the rules of the ius civile he might have taken it, is called caducous."

Finishing Up

The word framboesia is derived from the French word for raspberry, and is a chronic contagious disease characterized by raspberry-like excrescences. The disease is, thankfully, rather rare today. Though I don't want to get too far afield here, the word encourages us to look historically at medicine (just as we did with psychology above) in order to understand not only the conditions from which people used to suffer but the names that those conditions were called.

Ignotum per ignotius is an explanation which is even more obscure than the thing it purports to explain. It literally means "the unknown by the more unknown." An example of this might be instructions to operate a copy machine. It used to be that these machines were easy to operate; now they are much more complex, therefore ignotum. But when you usually try to read the instructions, you realize that the instructions, though apparently written in English, make no sense at all. You are trying to learn something about a phenomenon by studying something more obscure than the phenomenon itself.

Though I have been studying the Book of Job earnestly for several years, I handn't heard the word jobation or the verb to jobe. A jobation is a rebuke or reproof, especially one of a lengthy or tedious character. When my mother used to ball me out for playing in the swamp, she gave me a "jobation." The verb in English goes back to 1670: "In the University of Cambridge, the young scholars are wont to call chiding Jobing." It is an allusion to the lengthy rebukes delivered by Job to his friends.

The OED doesn't have lexiphanic as an entry (the word is Lexiphanes), but a Lexiphanes is "one who uses bombastic phraseology." Disraeli could criticize the 18th century writer Johnson in these words: "The encumbering Lexiphanicisms of the ponderous numerosity of Johnson." The word, literally meaning "phrase-monger," comes from the title of one of Lucian's (2nd century CE) dialogues. "Lexiphanic discourse," then, would be a speech or writing given over to pomposities.

Finally, let's conclude with nullibiety. We have seen a previous "iety" word, nimiety (meaing excess). If ubiquity means "everywhere" or the capacity to be everywhere at once, and if ubiety means "somewhere" or "whereness," nullibiety means the state or condition of being nowhere or non-existence. A recent literary critic could say: "It takes a Chekhov to get along on nullibiety." A rock star could go from a state of ubiquity to nullibiety in a matter of moments, depending on how one's star is rising or falling.

This isn't all the words we could do from the Superior Person's Book, but it gives you a good number of the more difficult ones. Good luck in your study of words!

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