“A sophistiocal rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and glorify himself.” That’s what Benjamin Disraieli said about William Gladstone in 1878.
Decades before Disraeli and Gladstone rose to prominence in British politics, William Pinkney was a US diplomat and was appointed Attorney General by James Madison in 1811. During his lifetime (1764-1822), he was also noted as an excellent orator. In those days, “excellent orator” often meant talking like this: “The tinsel of Lexiphanic language in many places involves his argument in almost inextricable mystery, and pains whom it was intended to please, by making them toil for instruction, when an easy, natural communication was practicable.”
In those days, most people who had made it through elementary school would understand exactly what Pinkney meant by “Lexiphanic language.” There’s a hint in the capitalization of “Lexiphanic” — it’s somebody’s name.
The ancient Greeks liked to write dialogues, where they came to their point by way of discussion between two characters. Lucian of Samosata, who lived in…well never mind, he was “of Samosata”…in the first century CE, wrote a dialogue featuring a character named “Lexiphanes.” His name was taken from “lexis,” which means word, and “phainein,” to show. And Lexiphanes showed off his words as much as he could. The other character in the dialogue, Lycinus, at one point says “There is not a doubt I shall go raving mad under the intoxication of your exuberant verbosity.”
A couple of centuries ago, people read this stuff in school, and even afterward, when there was no teacher telling them to. They would have made the connection between “Lexiphanic language” and Lucian’s dialogue. Frances Burney, an English novelist in the 18th and 19th centuries who went by “Fanny Burney,” also wrote journals and plays that have since been published. One of them, Dr. Johnson and Fanny Burney, includes this: “How little did I expect from this Lexiphanes, this great and dreaded lord of English literature, a turn for burlesque humour!” And Ms. Burney wasn’t showing off — that’s from work that wasn’t even published until 1911.
