Here’s a sentence you’d be unlikely to encounter nowadays. “It was noscible in the village that the oporopolist’s stall was often closed because of his fondness for riviation.” You’d be unlikely to encounter it because “noscible,” “oporopolist,” and “riviation” are all words that were once in general use in English, but haven’t been heard from in centuries.
“Noscible” was in use up until about the mid 1600s, and meant “well or widely known.” It was a shortened form of “cognoscible,” which means the same thing, and is not quite as obscure. It comes from the Latin “cognōscibilis,” which is also the source of the much more common “cognizance.”
An “oporopolist” is a fruit vendor. You might have been called an oporopolist if you sold apples in the market in the early 1700s, but after that you probably would have gotten out of that business entirely. You’d be annoyed, you see, because by then everybody would just have called you a “fruit seller,” which isn’t nearly as impressive. You’d probably have been forced into abject poverty, and would have become a subject in ptochologist’s monograph.
“Oporopolist” comes from the Latin “oporapolis,” and Latin borrowed it too — from Ancient Greek. It’s related to “oporice,” not that that’s particularly edifying, since “oporice” is at least as obscure — it was a medicine made from fruit. A 1753 reference said this about “oporice:” “a name given by the antients to a medicine composed of the autumnal fruits, and extolled for its great virtues against weaknesses of the stomach and dysenteries.”
People are still (probably) enjoying “riviation” even though the word hasn’t been used since the 1600s, and today we’re not entirely sure what it meant. It was either fishing or hunting water birds like ducks. It’s mentioned in a few old rimestocks, but it seems to have been used in both senses. Its original meaning was almost certainly hunting rather than fishing, because it came from the Middle French word “rivoier”, and that definitely meant hunting waterfowl. An English law book from 1787 mentions riviation:
“Before the statute of Magna Charta cap. 16. it was frequent for the king to..bar fishing or fowling in a river till the king had taken his pleasure or advantage of the writ or precept de defensione ripariæ, which anciently was directed to the sheriff to prohibit riviation in any rivers in his bailiwick.”
It’s also possible that the confusion about fishing or fowling comes from that old law book, because the Oxford English Dictionary (which places great store in the word’s etymology), speculates that M. Hale, the author of the law book, simply made a mistake.
By the way, the two stealth words here are “ptochology,” which is an obsolete word for the study of beggars, and “rimestock,” which is an “old almanac with runic writings”. Or at least it was when people still used that word; it hasn’t been seen in the wild since about 1830. Anybody using it since then is probably engaging in gaudiloquent flosculation.
