![]() ![]() A wampus is a stupid, dull, loutish clod. Yahoomanity is a portmanteau combining ‘humanity’ with Jonathan Swift’s coinage from Gulliver’s Travels, ‘Yahoo’, to describe the rage of brutish humans, and denotes ‘people en masse’. The author of this introduction, Robert Byrne (the compiler’s son, perhaps?), wittily concludes his preface by apologising ‘for the ammunition this book provides to bad writers.’Ī book that is ghost-written is not anonymous or, strictly, pseudonymous, but allonymous. But the words that are here are, it would seem, ‘real’ words rather than ones dreamt up by Byrne on a whim. ![]() The introduction reassures us: ‘Incredible as it may seem, every entry in this book, even the most ludicrous, has been accepted as a formal or legitimate English word by at least one major dictionary.’ Not all of them will be found in the OED, as they were presumably found in old and now rarely consulted lexicons from centuries past. The book remains out of print but turns up on various online bookshops for an affordable price from time to time. This book is the work of Josefa Heifetz Byrne, a concert pianist and composer, whose hobby was collecting odd words, which she gathered into a single volume in 1974. (I’ll except the Oxford English Dictionary here, and possibly Johnson’s dictionary, on the grounds that they are beyond question in the fascination stakes for the sheer vastness of their achievement.) Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual Obscure and Preposterous Words: Gathered from Numerous and Diverse Authoritative Sources, which may just be the most endlessly fascinating and entertaining lexicon I’ve yet encountered. None of these three words is likely to be on the tongues (or in the minds) of the average reader, and they were new to me until I recently encountered them, in Mrs. ![]()
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