The New York Times used to have a blog called “The Lede.” They shut it down around 2014, I think (you might say they “buried” The Lede), but not before the blog resurrected a word from the 1600s by using this headline: “Canada Bars ‘Infandous’ British Politician, Journalists Reach for Dictionaries.” The reporters in question might have been doing a lot of reaching; “infandous” was last used in 1708 and isn’t even included in most dictionaries these days.
It wasn’t the blog’s idea to use “infandous”; it was the spokesman for Canada’s minister of immigration who described George Galloway (the British politician) as an “infandous streetcorner Cromwell.” “Infandous” means “too odious to be expressed.” It comes from the Latin word “infandus,” which means abominable. It’s unclear where the Canadian spokesman even found the word. Even when it was in use, it wasn’t used very much, and it didn’t last very long. The first-ever use seems to have been in the 1620s by James Howell, who was imprisoned by Oliver Cromwell during the English Civil War. So there are TWO references to Cromwell — perhaps the Canadian spokesman is a Cromwell scholar in his spare time (in fact you could ask him; his name is Aly Velshi, currently working for NBC News).
“Infandous” wasn’t used very often, but when it did appear, the circumstances could be surprising. In 1693 Cotton Mather used it when writing about the Salem witch trials. After that it seems to have been generally forgotten. The same is true of a similar word “nefandous,” which was also used by James Howell. “Nefandous” means atrocious, and it’s derived from the same Latin roots.
If you dig even deeper into the Latin background it turns out the original base is “fari” (to speak). There are some more common English words with the same lineage: “famous” comes from “fari” because “fame” basically means people are speaking about you. If you’re easy to talk to, you’re “affable”. If there’s something that can’t be expressed in words, it’s “ineffable”. A child too young to speak is an “infant,” and an army has an “infantry” because that’s where the youngest recruits are stashed.
If “ineffable” is too common for you, and you’re hoping to equal Mr. Velshi in obscure language, you might try “inenarrable”. It has essentially the same meaning as ineffable, and comes from the Latin word “enarrare” (to describe). So to be “inenarrable” means something cannot be described. It’s not QUITE as obsolete or rare as “infandous,” but it’s close. It arrived in English in the 1400s from French, and has been sporadically used ever since. It appears in the 1941 novel “The Saint in Miami” (that’s the same “Saint” character who’s been featured in TV shows and movies) in a passage that makes you wonder how any of those books got popular in the first place:
“A long draught of the corrosive nectar, to be savoured with the inenarrable contentment which the divine fruit of such a pilgrimage deserved, washed gratifyingly around Mr Uniatz’s atrophied taste buds, flowed past his tonsils like Elysian vitriol, and swilled into his stomach with the comforting tang of boiling acid. He liked it.”
Talk about infandous writing…
