by Kevin Burton
Have I been snickering up my sleeve a bit as Merriam-Webster slings names at various miscreants?
Well, what goes around, comes around.
This is the third and final post looking at “A Handy Guide to Ruffians, Rapscallions, Cads and More, 22 Charming Words for Nasty People” published by the dictionary.
Among today’s entries is a five-syllable jaw-breaker of a word that describes the likes of me; writers on the Net hovering very close to complete invisibility.
The word is “anonymuncule.”
I have often said that the Internet needs an eraser. And you could say I am proving it five times a week with this blog.
There surely is a need for a word for the likes of us, laboring in a home office, typing into the wind as it were, producing perhaps a firefly’s worth of illumination.
But if so, I say there is need for a batter word than anonymuncule. I’m not sure even George F. Will would say anonymuncule.
Whether you look upon us with ridicule or with pity, you’re going to want to spit out something faster than anonymuncule. If you think it looks clunky in print, try saying it out loud!
If you have a better word, please leave it in comments below. Until then, here is one last offering of words about bad actors from Merriam-Webster:
Reprobate: a morally corrupt or depraved person
Reprobate comes from the Latin reprobare, meaning “to disapprove” or “to condemn.” The word is frequently used in the King James Version of the Bible to describe someone who understands God’s will but chooses to not follow it.
Mammothrept: a spoiled child
Mammothrept comes to the English language from the Greek word mammothreptos, which means, delightfully enough, “child brought up by his grandmother.”
It hardly matters whether children raised by a grandmother are indeed more likely to be spoiled; such a fine and descriptive word as mammothrept deserves to be used to describe spoiled children regardless of who has raised them.
Cad: a man who acts with deliberate disregard for another’s feelings or rights
One of the few gender-specific terms on this list, cad is a shortening of caddie, a Scottish term for one who waits around for odd jobs. (This sense of the term eventually developed into the golfing sense of caddie.) These days, cad is commonly linked to romantic misbehavior.
Mumpsimus: a bigoted adherent to exposed but customary error
The ostensible origin of mumpsimus is that long ago there was an illiterate priest who was in the habit of using this word when saying mass, rather than the correct Latin word sumpsimus (which means “we have taken”). When confronted with this error, the priest was reported to have said that he refused to change his old mumpsimus for the new sumpsimus offered by his critic.
Anonymuncule: an insignificant anonymous writer
We often hear today of the many ways that the Internet has changed social discourse, some number of which are exaggerated. One thing that the Internet has certainly done is to give rise to a burgeoning class of anonymuncules. We are inundated with such creatures, both in the comment sections of articles published on the web, and through various forms of social media, such as Twitter.
The word is a blend of anonymous and homunculus (“a little man”).
Scapegrace: a reckless unprincipled person; an incorrigible rascal
Scapegrace may come from the notion of escaping (scape meaning “to escape”) the grace of God. However serious that sounds, scapegrace, like scamp, is often used lightheartedly.
Gillygaupus: a stupid awkward person
It is an indisputable fact that some people are stupid, and we have a great number of words with which to describe them (birdbrain, blockhead, dummy, etc.). A further number of people are awkward, and we likewise have many words to choose from when describing them (bungler, klutz, and so on).
But what of the person who manages to be both stupid and awkward? Well, that person is a gillygaupus. Now you know.
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