Haggard Hawks 46

Resistentialism, alphabetical words, and flapdoodlers

POPULAR THIS WEEK

VIVE LA RÉSISTANCE

 

Most popular on HH this week was the word resistentialism, a term for the belief that inanimate objects can display malice or spitefulness towards humans. And if you’ve ever used the vacuum cleaner here at HHHQ, you’d know precisely what that’s like.

 

Admittedly, resistentialism is not a particularly serious term: labelled “humorous” by the OED, it’s a pun on existentialism coined by the English humorist and journalist Paul Jennings in 1948. In a parody of the verbose philosophical studies of Jean-Paul Sartre, Jennings explained that the theory of resistentialism had been the work of a grand Cambridge scholar whose research—the so-called “Clark-Trimble Experiments”—had proven the existence of resistentialism, without doubt:

 

Before the Royal Society in London, Clark-Trimble arranged 400 pieces of carpet in ascending degrees of quality, from coarse matting to priceless Chinese silk. Pieces of toast and marmalade, graded, weighed, and measured, were then dropped on each piece of carpet, and the marmalade-downwards incidence was statistically analysed. The toast fell right-side-up every time on the cheap carpet, except when the cheap carpet was screened from the rest (in which case the toast didn’t know that Clark-Trimble had other and better carpets), and it fell marmalade-downwards every time on the Chinese silk. Most remarkable of all, the marmalade-downwards incidence for the intermediate grades was found to vary exactly with the quality of carpet.

“Report on Resistentialism”, The Spectator (1948)

 

Jennings described resistentialism as a “philosophy of tragic grandeur”—the “philosophy of what Things think about Us”—at the heart of which was the basic tenet that “things are against us.” Since then, the term has fallen into occasional use in English—chiefly when photocopiers jam and refuse to print the last sheet of several hundred, or when unattended headphones left to their own devices in a coat pocket squirm their way into a Gordian knot. Or, seriously, the HH vacuum cleaner. That thing has a mind of its own. 

 

Elsewhere this week we found out that: 

 

  • the opposite of absenteeism is presenteeism—coming to work despite being unwell
  • in the 1500s people didn’t get “down in the dumps”, they got in their mubble-fubbles
  • Polygonum hydropiper is the water-pepper plant (but you can call it arse-smart)
  • something scialytic dispels darkness, while something acronical takes place at dawn
  • and collisions are technically only collisions if both the striking parties are moving...

POPULAR THIS WEEK

BRAZEN-FACED GOLDFINCH VENTRILOQUISTS

 

With Twitter now accepting 280-character tweets, it was time for HH to come through on a promise made a while back: now we’ve got twice the space, it was time for an entire alphabet’s worth of alphabetical words.

 

Every so often over on HH, a tweet about words containing impressively lengthy strings of consecutive letters will appear. So both feedback and backfield contain all the letters from A through to F. Jasminelike contains the letters IJKLMN. Kleptomania and sportsmanlike both contain KLMNOP. And liverwurst contains an R, an S, a T, a U, a V and a W. 

 

But this week, the time had come to cover the entire alphabet: 

 

  • GOLDFINCHES contains the letters CDEFGHI
  • KILIMANJARO contains the letters IJKLMNO
  • SUPEREQUIVALENT contains the letters PQRSTUV
  • TAXIWAY contains the letters WXY
  • BRAZEN-FACEDLY contains the letters YZABCDEF

 

But all this raises a couple of questions: what are the longest words, and for that matter the shortest words, that can be added to a list like this? 

 

Well, let’s start with the shortest—or as you could put it, the most economical.

 

As a couple of comments to the list pointed out on Twitter, the four-letter word waxy could be used in place of taxiway here, as it too contains the consecutive run W, X and Y, but crucially has fewer non-consecutive letters.

 

So that means that three out of the four letters in waxy—i.e. 75% of the word itself—are consecutive. Are there any words that can up that score? Well, yes there are. In fact, there are quite a few. 

 

Words comprised in their entirety from consecutive letters of the alphabet include the likes of cab, fed and feed, high, noon, and moon. Longer examples of 100%-ers like these are understandably harder to find, and often involve raiding the more obscure corners of the dictionary. Abaca is a hemp-like plant in the banana-tree family native to the Philippines. Baced is both an archaic spelling of based and a dialect word meaning “beaten”. To feigh something is to cleanse or clear it. Bacaba is a type of palm tree. And Zyzzyx is the name of a genus of sandwasp—an everyday word if ever there was one, clearly. 

 

As for the longest words that could make a list like this, so far no English dictionary word has been found to contain more than eight consecutive letters. That means the brazen-facedly example from above equals the record (so long as the alphabet is permitted to loop back on itself, YZABCDEF), alongside the likes of propinquities, preconquest and quadruplications, all of which contain the eight-letter chain NOPQRSTU.

 

Longer strings are certainly possible, but often rely on fairly questionable inventions and compound words like right-about-faced (which contains all nine letters from A to I) and quasi-complimentary (which contains everything from L to U, a total of 10). Get either those in the dictionary, and that record is yours... 

WORD OF THE WEEK

IN A FLAP

 

After a week in which the UK Secretary of State for International Development, Priti Patel, was forced to resign from the Cabinet after breaching ministerial code and the UK Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, faced calls to resign after misinformed comments he made about a charity worker imprisoned in Tehran led to calls in Iran for her jail sentence to be increased, we picked the word flapdoodler as HH Word of the Week.

 

A flapdoodler is an untrustworthy or inept political speaker. Etymologically, it literally describes someone who deals in flapdoodle—a word that has essentially been used to mean “nonsense” or “idle talk” since the early nineteenth century. But its origins in turn are a mystery.

 

“An arbitrary formation”, says the Oxford English Dictionary of flapdoodle, while pointing to an earlier and equally arbitrary seventeenth century word for nonsense, fadoodle, as its possible inspiration. Other dictionaries agree—but that hasn’t stopped them from breaking cover with their own imaginative etymological theories. In his Origins of English Words (1984) for instance, the philologist Joseph Shipley suggested that flapdoodle might be intended to combine the sounds of “flapping wings and [a] rooster crow”—perhaps in allusion to a preening, empty-headed coxcomb. <INSERT CONTEMPORARY EXAMPLE HERE.>

 

As a randomly invented word, it may come as little surprise that flapdoodle has been used in a number of equally random senses over the years. As far back as the late seventeenth century, it was apparently being used in English slang for what dictionaries euphemistically call the membrum virile. By the early 1800s, it had become the name of a fictitious foodstuff supposedly fed to idiots:

 

“The gentleman has eaten no small quantity of flapdoodle in his lifetime.”

“What’s that, O’Brien?” replied I. “I never heard of it.”

“Why, Peter,” rejoined he, “it’s the stuff they feed fools on.”

Frederick Marryat, Peter Simple (1823)

 

But it’s as another word for “rubbish” that flapdoodle has established itself most firmly in the language in the nineteenth century, alongside a handful of less familiar derivatives like flapdoodlish, flapdoodlism, and a verb form, to flapdoodle, meaning simply “to talk nonsense”.

 

It’s from the latter of these that our inept flapdoodler eventually emerged in the late 1800s, with the word’s political overtones appearing towards the turn of the century: according to one 1905 Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial English, a flapdoodler is “a braggart agitator ... that makes the eagle squeal.”

 

To make the eagle squeal, it goes on to explain, is an American expression “applied to anything which provokes national indignation”. <INSERT ANOTHER CONTEMPORARY EXAMPLE HERE.>

ANAGRAMS No. 13

 

Four more tricky anagrams to finish things off this week: the letters of each of these words can be rearranged to spell another dictionary word. What are they?

 

MATSAH

MADRONO

MARGINAL

MAUNGIER

 

Last week’s solution: COOPED, MOPIEST, ESCALOPE, CRAPULOUS

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