In 1872, in Nebraska, Louise Pound was born. She grew up to be a professor of English at the University of Nebraska. More to the point, she studied folklore — specifically, slang and dialects across middle America. The thing about most of these spoken variants of language is just that; they’re spoken, and not typically written down, so unless someone (say, a native Nebraskan professor and folklorist) happens by and takes notes, there might be no permanent record of any unique and interesting words that appear.
American slang between about 1850 and 1950 produced a large number of extravagant words. For some reason it was something of a craze or fad, and it produced “skedaddle,” “hornswoggle,” “absquatulate,” “sockdolager,” and more. And the thing about Dr. Pound is that she identified several of these words, including some that haven’t ever appeared anywhere else. She collected many of them from her students — it’s not clear whether she really did “show up with a notebook” in rural communities and start listening; fieldwork might not have been her approach.
In 1911, and again in 1916, she published some of these words in the journal Dialect Notes. It’s because of her that we know that “cackleberries” means eggs, that a word for something you can’t remember the name of is “optriculum,” if you’re impatient you’re “ramsasspatorious,” or if you’re astonished but pleased (a surprise party for you, perhaps), you’re feeling “discumgalligumfricated.” I’m sure you’re feeling like letting out a “hiptiminigy” about all this (an exuberant yell).
Other people contributed to Dialect Notes, of course, and some words were submitted more than once. The word “hypoppercanorious” was submitted by Dr. Pound as being in use in Nebraska, and was also reported in the wild in Massachusetts. Nearly the same is a word from Texas in the 1940s, “hippocanarious.” However you spell it, it means something very good, as does the also-similar “flippercanorious;” another one from Louise Pound.
Possibly the most extravagant submission from anyone also came from our Nebraska professor: “eellogofusciouhipoppokunurious.” It means something very good too, and was brought to the University of Nebraska by someone from western Oregon. It’s longer than everybody’s favorite example of a very long word (“antidisestablishmentarianism”), although it’s shorter than “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” or the word describing the effect of inhaling the dust and ash spewed by an active volcano: “pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.”
That last one is 45 letters long, so let’s just call it “p45”. The thing about that word is that it was created as a joke in 1935 in New York. The National Puzzler’s League was holding its 103rd semiannual get-together at the Hotel New Yorker, and Everett Smith (who was the president of the NPL and known to his fellow puzzlers as Puzzlesmith) included p45 as an illustration of the increasing length of terms coming out of the medical profession. There were doctors in the NPL, and none of them were familiar with p45 — which they assumed was because of the growing specialization in their field. What Puzzlesmith didn’t tell them (until later) was that p45 wasn’t a real medical term; he’d made it up himself. But then the New York Herald-Tribune mentioned it in a story about the NPL meeting. It was included in a book. Then the 1939 Merriam-Webster dictionary included it. After that, other dictionaries began to include it too, because that’s what dictionaries do. After that, p45 was an “official word,” all quite by accident. The medical profession never adopted p45 though; they already had a word for that ailment: “silicosis.” Ain’t that a sockdolager?
