Pick up a copy of the 2002 “New York Times Everyday Reader’s Dictionary of Misunderstood, Misused, and Mispronounced Words” and you’ll find that the author described it thusly: “This is not a succedaneum for satisfying the nympholepsy of nullifidians.”
A “succedaneum” can be a substitute for “substitute.” It’s derived from the Latin “succedaneus,” which is also where “succeed” and “success” come from. The difference is that “succedaneum,” and the closely related “succedaneous,” are closer to the original Latin usage. “Succedaneus” means something coming after or replacing, and it doesn’t come with any implication of a good or bad outcome. If you go back about 6 centuries, “success” and “succeed” didn’t have that implication either. “Success” was simply a conclusion. There could be “good success” or “ill success.”
It wasn’t until nearly the 1700s that “success” began to mean only the good kind. But “succedaneum,” which was also in use at the time, never picked up that connotation. By now it has almost completely disappeared, although in medicine a “succedaneum” is still occasionally used to mean a not-as-effective replacement drug.
“Nympholepsy” is a desire for something that can’t be obtained. It comes from Greek roots and originally referred to the passion human men would have for nymphs — unattainable, of course, because there weren’t really any nymphs at all. It’s not completely obsolete, but it is pretty rare. It was employed by our old friend Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who for some reason keeps popping up when you look into obscure words. It’s in his novel “Godolphin:” “The most common disease to genius is nympholepsy—the saddening for a spirit that the world knows not.”
“Nullifidian,” in the 1500s, meant an athiest; someone who was sceptical specifically about religion. By the 1600s, though, it had come to mean someone who disbelieved in something (or something) in particular, but not necessarily religion. In 1668 “The English Rogue Described in the Life of Meroton Latroon” (a description, by the way, that extended through four volumes) used “nullifidian” appeared in a very irreligious context “The very Ale-house-keeper..was now grown such a Nullifidian, that he would not believe us for small-beer.” By the 1700s “nullifidian” had generalized a bit more, and meant any sceptic. Algernon Charles Swinburne’s 1877 “Miscellanies” presented it pretty clearly: “The sceptic, or in the phrase of Wither’s time the nullifidian Nott.” “Nullifidian” is still in use, as in the 2013 “Open Roads, Closed Borders”: “One of the most overt references to paganism as an expression of nullifidian opposition occurs in the enclosed, slightly claustrophobic space of Isabelle’s car.”
You might be trying to figure out what kind of book would include a sentence like that — it turns out to be a collection of essays about road movies produced in French. The Amazon description says this: “Taken together, the essays illustrate how travel and road motifs have enabled directors of various national origins and backgrounds to reimagine space and move beyond simple oppositions such as Islam and secularism, local and global, home and away, France and Africa, and East and West.”
Since at $57 “Open Roads, Closed Borders” is the most expensive Kindle edition I’ve run across, we’ll have to leave it at that; we may never know whether or not it might be “a succedaneum for satisfying the nympholepsy of nullifidians.” My guess would be no, which at least places “Open Roads, Closed Borders” in the same category as “The New York Times Everyday Reader’s Dictionary of Misunderstood, Misused, and Mispronounced Words”. Otherwise those two books don’t have much in common. That dictionary doesn’t even HAVE a Kindle edition!
