Thursday, August 05, 2004

 
WHILOM.
External link: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=whilom+&btnG=Google+Search

The wordsmith.org word of the day is "whilom," which means "formerly," as in "[H]e quotes the whilom CEO of RJR Nabisco, Ross Johnson . . . ."

So, I'm thinking, whoever heard of that word? If I use that word in conversation, who is going to have any idea what I'm talking about? Where did they even come up with their quoted examples of the use of the word (the above is from the Washington Post, 10/6/1991)?

So, I do a google search for the word, and the entire first page of results is nothing but dictionary definitions of the word, many calling the word "weird" or "difficult" or "brainy".

So, what is that? Is this even a real word, if its primary "use" is to be a hard-to-know word?

So, how do you know if you've found a cool, new difficult word, or a ridiculous, useless word, anyway? I'll tell you how: if it is useful. If "whilom" just means formerly, and has no "sense" other than the sense of being obscure, then it is useless, since we can do everything we want the word whilom to do, by just using the word "formerly."

By contrast, an almost equally obscure word, which was also a word-of-the day, is "callipygian," which is now one of my favorite words. It means, "having a shapely buttocks." That is a useful word that you can use at least a couple of times a month, and which describes a concept for which there is no other word, and which describes an extremely common phenomenon, for which we most certainly need a word.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that concepts are like crevices in the sidewalk, and useful words fill up those crevices, while useless words pile up for us to trip over.

P.S.: the blogger.com spell-checker has never heard of whilom or callipygian!

This is The Official Record. 12:30 AM
link to this item: http://www.creamy.com/blog/2004/08/whilom.html

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