Honorificabilitudinitatibus
Honorificabilitudinitatibus is the dative and ablative plural of the mediæval Latin word honorificabilitudinitas, which can be translated as "the state of being able to achieve honours". It is mentioned by the character Costard in Act V, Scene I of William Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost.[1] As it appears only once in Shakespeare's works, it is a hapax legomenon in the Shakespeare canon. It is also the longest word in the English language featuring alternating consonants and vowels.[2]
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[edit] Use in Love's Labour's Lost
The word is spoken by the comic rustic Costard in Act V, Scene 1 of the play. It is used after an absurdly pretentious dialogue between the pedantic schoolmaster Holofernes and his friend Sir Nathaniel. The two pedants converse in a mixture of Latin and florid English. When Moth, a witty young servant, enters, Costard says of the pedants,
"O, they have lived long on the alms-basket of words. I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word; for thou art not long by the head as honorificabilitudinitatibus: thou art easier swallowed than a flap-dragon."
Flap-dragon was a game which involved trying to eat hot raisins from a bowl of burning brandy.
[edit] Use in Baconism
The word has been used by adherents of the Baconian theory—who believe Shakespeare's plays were written in steganographic cypher by Francis Bacon. In 1905 Isaac Hull Platt argued that it was an anagram for hi ludi, F. Baconis nati, tuiti orbi, Latin for "these plays, F. Bacon's offspring, are preserved for the world".[3] His argument was given wide circulation by Edwin Durning-Lawrence in 1910.[4] The anagram assumes that Bacon would have Latinized his name as "Baco" (the genitive case of which is "Baconis") rather than as "Baconus" (the genitive of which would be "Baconi"). Samuel Schoenbaum argues that Bacon would have Latinized his name as "Baconus", with genitive "Baconi".[5] John Sladek noted in the 1970s that the word could also be anagrammatized as I, B. Ionsonii, uurit [writ] a lift'd batch, thus "proving" that Shakespeare's works were written by Ben Jonson. (The two "u"s, rendered as "v"s in the original literation, are put together to form - literally - "a double u" (w), as was common practice in Shakespeare's day.)[6][7] Since it involves an odd mixture of Latin and English, which Bacon would have been unlikely to use, Sladek's parody of Durning-Lawrence's argument is not universally conceded to discredit the latter.
[edit] Other uses
The word, however, was used long before Shakespeare used it in Love's Labour's Lost. Honorificabilitudo appears in a Latin charter of 1187, and occurs as honorificabilitudinitas in 1300.[citation needed] Dante cites honorificabilitudinitate as a typical example of a long word in De Vulgari Eloquentia II. vii.[8] It also occurs in the works of Rabelais and in The Complaynt of Scotland (1549). The year after the publication of Love's Labours Lost it is used by Thomas Nashe in his 1599 pamphlet Nashe’s Lenten Stuff: "Physicians deafen our ears with the Honorificabilitudinitatibus of their heavenly Panacaea, their sovereign Guiacum", referring to the exotic medicinal plant Guaiacum, the name of which was also "exotic", being the first Native American word imported into the English language.[9] The word also appears in Marston's Dutch Courtezan (1605)[10]
James Joyce also used this word in his mammoth novel Ulysses, during the Scylla and Charybdis episode when Stephen Dedalus articulates his interpretation of Hamlet.
In 1993 U.S. News and World Report used the word in its original meaning with reference to a debate about new words being used in the game of Scrabble; "Honorificabilitudinity and the requirements of Scrabble fans dictated that the New Shorter [Oxford English Dictionary]'s makers be open-minded enough to include dweeb (a boringly conventional person), droob (an unprepossessing or contemptible person, esp. a man) and droog (a member of a gang: a young ruffian)."[11] However, practically this word cannot be used in an actual Scrabble game because it is longer than the word length possible on a Scrabble board.
In Suzanne Selfors' 2011 Children's novel "Smells Like Treasure", her spelling champion character Hercules Simple, uses the word to describe the main character in the book.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O54-Honorificabilitudinitatbs.html
- ^ http://www.innocentenglish.com/cool-interesting-and-strange-facts/cool-strange-and-interesting-facts-page-3-3.html%7CSee fact #99
- ^ http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O54-Baconiantheory.html
- ^ K. K. Ruthven, Faking Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p.102
- ^ Samuel Schoenbaum, 'Shakespeare's Lives, Oxford University Press, 2nd ed.1991 p.421
- ^ entropy@ziplink.net,Jewish Magazine. "Shakespeare and the Jewish Connection". Jewishmag.com. http://www.jewishmag.com/115mag/shakespeare/shakespeare.htm. Retrieved 2010-08-23.
- ^ http://www.rbms.info/committees/bibliographic_standards/dcrm/wg2LeslieGriffin.pdf
- ^ "Dante: De Vulgari Eloquentia II". google.com. 2010-08-04. http://google.com/search?q=cache:8BqA8-XmOZ0J:www.thelatinlibrary.com/dante/vulgar2.shtml+Dante+honorificabilitudinitate+De+Vulgari+Eloquentia+II&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari. Retrieved 2010-08-23.
- ^ Bailey, Richard W (2004). "Part I - American English: its origins and history". In Edward Finegan; John R. Rickford. Language in the USA: Themes for the Twenty-first Century. Cambridge University Press. p. 3. ISBN 9780521777476. http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780511206948&ss=exc.
- ^ Douglas Hamer, review of Schoenbaum's "Shakespeare's Lives," in Review of English Studies, 22 (1971)
- ^ Jennifer Fisher; Droobs and Dweebs; U.S. News & World Report (Washington, DC); Oct 11, 1993.
[edit] External links
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