If you’re anything like Shakespeare, (and come on, you know you are!) you occasionally have the need to fling an epithet at someone. And here’s a good one. Shakespeare used it in “As You Like It.” When you use it, you’re calling someone immoral, vile, heinous, highly criminal, very wicked. The word is somewhat obscure, but that makes it all the better as a hurled insult that baffles your foes: “facinorous.”
It comes from the Latin word “facinorosus” (criminal or evil), and that came from the root word “facinus” (a bad deed). It’s still in modern use, although not very often. Lemony Snicket used it in “The Slippery Slope,” published in 2003. And as is customary in Lemony Snicket books, the author even explained the word:
“Some people called this man wicked. Some called him facinorous, which is a fancy word for ‘wicked.’”
You don’t encounter opportunities to use “facinorous” on a hebdomadal basis, of course. “Hebdomadal,” like “heptathlon,” is based on the Greek “hepta,” for seven, so “hebdomadal” is, of course, something that occurs every seven days. The word comes from the early 1700s, and even though it has ancient Greek roots it probably entered English via Latin, which includes the word “hebdomadalis,” which means the same thing. It was in somewhat common use in the 1700s but since then has been eclipsed by “weekly,” a Germanic word that’s much easier to say.
Being “easier to say,” of course, is of little or no concern to the lipogrammatists and pangrammatists of the world. Both of those “grammatists” are, as you might guess, writers of a sort. A “pangrammatist” tries to compose the shortest possible sentence/poem/ode/essay that nevertheless contains all the letters of the alphabet. A lipogrammatist’s goal may actually be slightly more difficult sometimes; a “lipogram” is short composition that contains all the letters of the alphabet except one. Here’s one from the 1800s that satisfies the most difficult choice: omitting the letter “e”:
“A jovial swain may rack his brain,
and tax his fancy’s might,
To quiz in vain, for ’tis most plain,
That what I say is right.”
The obvious thing to note, of course, that the goal of a pangram is to be as SHORT as possible while using the whole alphabet, while the most impressive lipograms are as LONG as possible. The winner is probably either Vincent Wright, who published the novel “Gadsby” in 1939 — it’s about 50,000 words long and doesn’t contain an “e” — or Georges Perec, who published “La Disparition” in 1969 — that one runs to 300 pages, still without an “e”. Of course, “La Disparition” was published in French, and who knows, maybe that made it easier to omit the letter “e.” However, it was translated into English in 1995 (“A Void”) also without a single “e”, so the translator Gilbert Adair has a credible claim to a lipogrammatist medal too.
By the way, “lipogram” comes straight from the Greek word “lipogrammatos”, which means “lacking a letter.” That original word was formed from “leipein” (to leave out) and “gramma” (a letter). Although it looks at first glance like it might be derived from “lipo” (fat, as in “liposuction”), it’s not related at all. And anybody who tries to claim that it does is simply facinorous.
