Pylimitics

In 1653, Sir Thomas Urquhart translated The First Book of the Work of Mr. Francis Rabelais. Urquhart was a Scottish aristocrat who was also a writer, but he is most known for his translations of Rabelais. That, and the way he died, of course. When he heard that Charles II had become the king, Urquhart laughed so hard that he keeled over dead.

While it’s true that Charles II ascended to the throne amidst a number of irregularities, it’s not at all clear why Urquhart found the event so fatally amusing. But since that’s really not the point here, we’ll simply ignore the question, even though it’s probably more interesting that what we’re delving into. To get back to business, when Urquhart translated that particular work of Rabelais, he included this sentence: “He mumbled all his Kiriele, and dunsical breborions.” And that’s our point right there: dunsical breborions.

“Breborion” is a word borrowed from French, and it seems pretty likely that Urquhart was the one who did the borrowing. Before the word was “breborion,” it was “breiarum,” which was defined back in the day as “foolish charmes or superstitious prayers, vsed by old and simple women against the toothache, and any such thredbare and mustie rags of blind devotion.” In other words, it was something without any value and without any use.

The word has appeared a couple of times over the years, but literally only a couple. “Breborion” is a surpassingly obscure word. “Dunsical,” on the other hand, has managed to stay current, at least through its close relative “dunce.” It actually comes from someone’s name: John Duns Scotus. Scotus was quite well known as one of the most important thinkers of the Middle Ages. However, if you consider the Middle Ages for a moment, you’ll realize that being one of the most important thinkers of an era like that might not be quite as impressive as it sounds. 

Scotus tended to invent arguments of loony complexity for whatever he was writing about. He came up with “haecceity,” which is based on the Latin word haecceitas, and is best described as the property of “thisness.” That is, any reference to something that makes it clear that it’s THIS something and not THAT something — that’s haeccity. Yeah, I know.

Anyway, as a result of theories like that, as well as the tendency of folks like Scotus to be irritatingly pedantic and argumentative — not to mention that his followers, the Scotists, later argued vociferously against Renaissance humanism — the appellations “dunsical” and “dunce” came to mean anybody who couldn’t think straight or perform any legitimate scholarship. (Remember what I said about being a leading thinker in an era not known for thinking).

So there you have it; a guy who wanted to be a writer but mostly just translated somebody else’s material, a guy who made people die laughing when he became a king, and a leading thinker whose name is used to insult people as stupid. And you think the stuff going on nowadays is nuts!