In his 1985 book “The Superior Person’s Book of Words”, Peter Bowler includes this example of an insult:
“Sir, you are an apogenous, bovaristic, coprolalial, dasypygal, excerebrose, facinorous, gnathonic, hircine, ithyphallic, jumentous, kyphotic, labrose, mephitic, napiform, oligophrenial, papuliferous, quisquilian, rebarbative, saponaceous, thersitical, unguinous, ventripotent, wlatsome, xylocephalous, yirning zoophyte.”
As you’ve probably noticed, that sentence is made up of twenty-six insult words, each beginning with a different letter, and all arranged alphabetically. And that makes it possibly the only complete “abecedarian” insult ever composed. There are other things abecedarian too; it means anything in alphabetical order.
Although “abecedarian” sort of sounds like a recent, probably humorous word, it entered English (from French) in the sixteenth century. In its early years — and if you count its Latin origin, those years go back another thousand before its appearance in English — it meant a person who knew the alphabet. It was also used as an insult itself sometimes; it referred to a person who needed to learn the alphabet (or to learn anything at all), and implied they were ignorant.
Occasionally abecedarian poems appear, which is probably a good sign that there are bored poets in the vicinity. The “Literary Gazette,” a London journal, published one by Aleric Watts in 1820. It doesn’t follow quite the same pattern as the insult up above; instead each line is made up of words starting with the same letter. The first bit goes like this:
“An Austrian army, awfully arrayed,
Boldly by battery besieged Belgrade.
Cossack commanders cannonading come,
Dealing destruction’s devastating doom…”
You probably have a pretty good idea how many more lines there are. But whenever you’re assembling words in a particular order, not so much to make them mean something but just because of that sequence, you run the risk of producing bafflegab. Bafflegab is a close relative of a couple of other words that have popped up in this space: “lexiphanic” and “orotund.” Bafflegab means a bunch of words that end up being incomprehensible, ambiguous, verbose, and complex. In other words, nonsense. “Bafflegab” itself is the opposite of its meaning; it’s immediately clear and concise. It was coined in 1951 by Milton Smith. He was a lawyer for the US Chamber of Commerce and also wrote for the “Washington Report,” a weekly publication of the Chamber. At one point he was writing about a report generated by the Office of Price Stabilization. Smith found the language in the report so befuddling (and remember, he was a lawyer) that he decided a special word was needed.
“Bafflegab” was such a good descriptor of bureaucratic language (which could be abecedarian, but usually isn’t, unfortunately) that the “Bellingham Herald” newspaper had a plaque made and presented to Smith in early 1952. At the presentation, Smith defined his new word pretty well. He explained that it described “multiloquence characterized by consummate interfusion of circumlocution or periphrasis, inscrutability, and other familiar manifestations of abstruse expatiation commonly utilized for promulgations implementing Procrustean determinations by governmental bodies.”
