You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
If you need an English word that means to lick a plate, and you might sometime, there is one. It’s catilate. C-A-T-I-L-L-A-T-E. It means to lick a plate, and it doesn’t come from the word cat. It comes from a Latin word that means a small plate.
Or say you want to refer to somebody who never laughs. There’s a word for that, too. It’s agelastic. It’s like agey and then elastic. And you don’t hear those words very often or maybe at all. But they’re words included in a dictionary compiled by lexicographer Henry Cockerham, which was published in 1623.
And he came up with all these weird-sounding Latin and Greek-based words. But he’s also credited with at least the first recorded use of words like girlishness and immigrate and cremation. He may not have coined those words, but he invented a lot of other ones. They’re what we call inkhorn terms, and that’s a reference to inkhorns carried by 14th century scribes.
They kept their ink in a little bottle made out of an animal horn, and people like Henry Cockerham showed off their bloated, fancy words like catalate and agelastic by lifting Latin and Greek words and just cramming them into English. And his dictionary is fun reading, but some of those words are a little silly.
Yeah, there’s one that makes the rounds on social media pretty regularly. That’s letibulate, which is to hide yourself in a corner, or as he writes it, privily to hide oneself in a corner. I like that privily. And it comes from the Latin word latibulum, which is a hiding place or a den.
Strangely, someone later also coined the word latibulize, which means to retire into a hiding place or to retreat for the winter. So he wasn’t the only one to mess around with Latin and see what they could do. Interesting.
Yeah, and it’s related to the word latent. You know, if something’s latent, it’s hidden. But I do like the idea of latibulate. A lot of times I want to latibulate.
Right. Yeah, not just in the corner, but like what’s the furthest spot from everyone else? Well, we talk about all kinds of words on this show, and we would love to talk with you. 877-929-9673 or send your emails about language to words@waywordradio.org.
