One of my favourite Blackadder scenes is that in which our hero congratulates Dr Johnson, who has just completed his dictionary after 10 years (“Yes, well I’m a slow reader myself” - Prince Regent), on including every single word in the English language:
And later…
Like most viewers, I originally assumed these words were invented, but thinking about them, many of them appear to make perfect sense, or even be real words already.
“Compunctuous” and “velocitous” are obviously in the dictionary.
“Extramuralisation” comes from the Latin extra, meaning outside, and murus, meaning “wall” (as in “mural”), so it means “to take something outside the walls”, i.e. to leave the building. A Google search shows that it seems to be used from time to time, in all seriousness, as a synonym for “outsourcing”.
“Pendigestatory interludicule”? Well, we have the prefix “pen-”, from the Latin paene, meaning “almost”, so “pendigestatory” relates to something that is “almost a meal”, i.e. a snack. The suffix “-cule” means “small”, so an “interludicule” is a short break. So, a short snack break.
“Pericombobulation” presumably comes from “peri-”, meaning “around”, and “discombobulate”, meaning “to confuse”.
Now it gets tricky. “Anaspeptic” is obviously related to “peptic”, related to digestion. “Ana-” can mean “backwards” or “upwards”, so the word could mean something similar to “dyspeptic”.
“Interphrastically” - could it mean “between phrases”?
“Contrafibularities” - well, “contra” means “against”, but other than that, no clue.
And as for “phrasmotic” - no idea.
Any English majors agree or disagree?
