Sesquipedalian Songs

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Chris Pacharka. I’m calling from Dana Point, just up the road from you folks.

How’s it going, Chris?

Well, I had a question. There was something, well, I come from a big family. I have five older brothers, one younger brother. And my older brothers were very scholastic. You know, they took language in school. They, you know, they were accomplished. And so they were always tossing around books, you know, well, I don’t mean at each other, I mean passing books, you know, from one to another. And I don’t know who came up with it, but this is something I remember from probably the time I was maybe 10 years old. But somebody came up with this extrapolated, what I call the extrapolated version of three blind mice. And, you know, everybody knows the three blind mice. They use it for the three stooges. That was kind of a theme, too. But, and it’s where they substitute all the words for as big and complicated a word as they can find.

Right.

So.

How does it go?

I guess you probably want to hear that.

Yes, please.

Of course.

Okay.

A trio of rodents with impaired vision.

A trio of rodents with impaired vision.

Observe their method of ambulation.

Observe their method of ambulation.

They attempted to pursue the agricultural spouse.

She amputated their posterior regions with a sharp kitchen utensil.

A trio of rodents with impaired vision.

A trio of rodents with impaired vision.

And you learned this from your older brothers?

I learned it from my older brothers.

Oh, and you drove your parents crazy.

Yeah, my parents. They were very patient with us.

You had seven sons in that family?

There were seven of us all together, yeah.

Good Lord.

Oh, the humanity.

Your sainted parents.

It was like a little platoon.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Boy, you can field a team in any sport almost.

So have you ever heard of anybody doing this with like a simple song and making it crazy like that?

Oh, not exactly.

We did have a caller on the show quite a while back who had this really long, obfuscated way of explaining that the foot was broken.

That’s right.

We’ll dig that one out of the archives maybe.

That’s right.

I read this passage on the show, oh, I don’t know, sometime this past year from a guy who wrote a novel using the absolute longest words he could find. It was just love letters between a couple.

Do you remember that, Martha?

Sure, yeah.

And very Latinate phrases with these ten-syllable words where a one-syllable word would do.

Yeah, I was exhausted when you finished reading that.

And also, we have talked on the show in the past about inkhorn terms. These are these long words invented just for the sake of having long words. And so it kind of fits into this trend of playing with language, which is you do the opposite of what you’re supposed to do. Instead of simplifying and adding clarity, you obfuscate and occlude.

My question for you is, did you get any hints from your brothers where they picked this up? Did they make it themselves or from a book or where?

I don’t know of any actual origins, but what I suspect is that it was probably something they came up with with their friends, just playing around with the language.

We took Latin.

Good for you.

Yeah.

So that helped.

All right.

Well, Chris, we’re going to put the word out to everybody, and we’ll find out what they know about this. Email us, words@waywordradio.org, or call us, 877-929-9673.

Thanks, Chris.

We’ll let you know what we find out, okay?

Bye, Chris.

Thanks for having me on.

Bye-bye.

You know, Martha, I almost want to call him back and have him sing that again.

But that’d be mean.

I want to make a ringtone out of it.

Maybe it could be the music that we play under our credits at the end of the show.

Don’t you think?

We can learn it.

Two blind mice.

877-929-9673.