Books: Adoxography

WORDS

by Paul Dickson

Delacorte; 366 pages; $13.95

You may know that a moirologist is a professional mourner, that an anthracomancer tells fortunes by means of burning coals, and that a mumpsimus is someone who refuses to correct an error (this last being derived from a 16th century priest who kept using that word when reciting the Mass even though he had been repeatedly told that he was supposed to say sumpsimus). But how many people are aware that pizzlesprung is a Kentucky word to describe the weary, or that nutation is the wobble in the earth's axis caused by the pull of the moon? Who remembers that there was a time when the head of the house didn't simply carve the roast but allayed a pheasant, reared a goose, minced a plover, dismembered a hen or disfigured a peacock?

Paul Dickson knows all those things because he collects words with what he calls "a zeal that borders on the compulsive." Does this mean yet another Safiresque sermon on proper usage and the maintenance of grammatical traditions? No, Dickson has no ideological purpose. He is the amiable spieler who wrote such frivolities as The Great American Ice Cream Book and The Mature Person's Guide to Kites, Yo-Yos, Frisbees . . . As for words, he nuzzles them all with puppyish enthusiasm.

The novelty lies in the organization. Dickson provides perfectly sensible categories like Outdoors Words, in which we learn that a schizocarp is a seed pod that breaks into two or more pieces, or Alimentary Words, in which we learn that funistrada is an imaginary food invented by the U.S. armed services to use as a control in polls asking soldiers which foods they like (funistrada came out higher than eggplant or cranberry juice).

Dickson's categories become increasingly funistradian. The section Punk, for example, lists 43 definitions of that word, and then goes on to define punkah, punkateero and punkatunk. Sexy Words includes cataglottism, ecdemolagnia, parnel, renifleur and stasivalence (don't ask). Under Curses, Dickson offers such arcana as feague, which a 1785 dictionary defined as "to put ginger up a horse's fundament, to make him lively and carry his tail well."

Dickson seems to have found a word for just about anything. Under Fizzlers, terms whose time has not yet come, he lists Americaid, one of 22 names proposed by the Nixon Administration in 1972 as a replacement for welfare. And chirtonsor, a euphemism for barber, which won the votes of 3,000 barbers in 1924. And electrolethe, a more genteel version of electric chair. There is even a word, logodaedaly, for "the capricious coining of words."

Dickson's words have not only definitions but shapes and structures and quirky personalities. Facetiously, he reminds us, is one of the few words in which all the vowels appear in the proper sequence; duoliteral is one of the even fewer in which they all appear backward. Kinnikinnik, he reports, is not only an Indian smoking mixture of bark and leaves but the longest palindrome among the 450,000 entries in Webster's Third New International Dictionary. Cuspidor is the word that James Joyce declared to be the most beautiful in the entire language.

And then there is the inexplicable rumor that there are only three words in the English language that end in gry—

Stop!