Friday Love Floccinaucinihilipilification

After you read the title, what do you think... am i type anything or naa-da...? haha or can u even read it? hahah... well, for your information this is a word that has its own meaning. By the way, i'm not trying to be english teacher here but as a researcher, i should share with you this word..


Let me tell you the story.. based on my research yesterday i found that this word is the kind of jocular formation that was possible among educated men in Britain in those days. Just so, as in praesenti, the opening words of mnemonic lines on conjugation in Lilley's 16c. Latin grammar, could stand alone as late as 19c. and be understood to mean "rudiments of Latin."

To make you more understand about this word this is the story behind it..

Eton College

Back in the eighteenth century, Eton College had a grammar book which listed a set of words from Latin which all meant “of little or no value”. In order, those were flocci, nauci, nihili, and pili (which sound like four of the seven dwarves, Roman version, but I digress). As a learned joke, somebody put all four of these together and then stuck –fication on the end to make a noun for the act of deciding that something is totally and absolutely valueless (a verb, floccinaucinihilipilificate, to judge a thing to be valueless, could also be constructed, but hardly anybody ever does). The first recorded use is by William Shenstone in a letter in 1741: “I loved him for nothing so much as his flocci-nauci-nihili-pili-fication of money”.

William Shenstone

A quick Latin lesson: flocci is derived from floccus, literally a tuft of wool and the source of English words like flocculate, but figuratively in Latin something trivial; pili is likewise the plural of pilus, a hair, which we have inherited in words like depilatory, but which in Latin could mean a whit, jot, trifle or generally a thing that is insignificant; nihili is from nihil, nothing, as in words like nihilism and annihilate; nauci just means worthless.

The word’s main function is to be trotted out as an example of a long word (it was the longest in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary but pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis edged it out in the second). It had a rare public airing in 1999 when Senator Jesse Helms used it in commenting on the demise of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty: “I note your distress at my floccinaucinihilipilification of the CTBT”.

this is an example how we can use this word...

Brak, in The Brack Show: "Brakstreet" November 3, 2002

Boasts "'Surrender' is not in my vocabulary, my good man," and ends, whining "… but, then, neither is 'Floccinaucinihilipilification'!"


Robert A. Heinlein, in The Number of the Beast (1980):

"Sharpie darling, you are a floccinaucinihilipilificatrix."
"Is that a compliment?"
"Certainly! Means you're so sharp you spot the slightest flaw."
I kept quiet. It was possible that Zebadiah meant it as a compliment. Just
barely- "Maybe I'd better check it in a dictionary."
"By all means, dear-after you are off watch." (I dismissed the matter.
Merriam Microfilm was all we had aboard and Aunt Hilda would not find that
word in anything less than the O.E.D.)

Mike McCurry (1995), United States President Bill Clinton's press secretary:

"But if you -- as a practical matter of estimating the economy, the difference is not great. There's a little bit of floccinaucinihilipilification going on here."

The comic strip Zippy the Pinhead (March 14, 1996):

"Do you think I may be too quick to find fault with things and people,Zippy?"
"Yeh."
"Th' 'floccinaucinihilipilification' process."
"Th' what?"
"Floccinaucinihilipilification!! It means 'the estimation of something as
valueless'!"
"You've been randomly reading th' dictionary, haven't you?"
"Yes. That and my natural tendency toward
antifloccinaucinihilipilification!!"

~Love~