Nugatory. Nugatory nugatory nugatory.
A nugget of a word, a pebble of a different hue from words of similar meaning. A thing I clipped my tongue around for days, and moved from cheek to cheek; a thing rather like a boiled sweet.
Not that I knew what it meant when I came across it in Jonathan Franzen’s book, Freedom.
According to the Oxford Dictionary’s website, there are around a quarter of a million distinct English words, excluding inflections, words from technical and regional vocabularies and words not yet published in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Which, by the way, runs to 20 volumes.
If the exclusions could be counted, we’re probably looking at a vocabulary of about 750 000 words.
The chances of coming across each one of them in a lifetime is highly improbable.
So each time a new one wings past on the breezes, winds and hurricanes of any kind of writing, I feel a little thrill – akin, I imagine to that felt by bird watchers spotting a species they’ve never seen before.
Does it matter that I might never find a use for “nugatory” in a sentence?
Should I be cross with Franzen for choosing a four-syllable word when he might have used one with just one?
Some people become irritable when they come across a new word; some so grumpy they feel moved to write letters to editors berating writers for using them.
I am all for directness in communication, and news stories, in particular, should be written as simply as possible to convey meaning quickly and succinctly, using short words, sentences and paragraphs .
But if a word can more precisely pin meaning to the page in other types of writing – opinion pieces and analysis, features, essays, novels, poems – should it be discarded because it might be a little under-used in every day speech? Why do new words make people so cross?
No. That’s disingenuous of me. I do know, but don’t want to broach the sticky topic of language elitism in a column about books.
“Big” words – and their purveyors – will always have accusations of snobbery sneeringly tossed at them, as though the number of syllables, or degree of obscurity, is some manifestation of delusions of superiority.
New words delight me.When they are delivered by way of a novel as wide in scope, as layered in theme, as rich in dialogue and as intense in its scrutiny of human folly as Franzen’s Freedom, well, then, I am beyond delighted.
I feel madly happy to be able to read, I feel deeply grateful for the existence of alphabets and phonemes, paragraphs and sentences, language, sound and meaning.
I’ve stated in a previous column that I tend to steer clear of hyped books, and Freedom – with some almost ominously declaring it the book of the century – is nothing if not hyped. But after the delicious meal of his first hit – The Corrections – there was no way I was going to pass up this one.
Believe the hype. Freedom is not bad.
And that, by the way, is a litotes – my other new word for the week.
And to save you a trip to your bookshelf for your dictionary, or a one-minute flip around Google, I can tell you briefly, that “litotes” is a noun meaning “ironic understatement”.
l Schimke is an independent columnist, author and poet and editor of the Cape Times books pages.