Pylimitics

The famous novelist Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton — he’s famous these days for being a bad novelist — wrote, in 1842,  this line in his most famous novel, Paul Clifford: “If Paul’s comrade laughed at first, he now laughed ten times more merrily than ever. He threw his full length of limb upon a neighbouring sofa, and literally rolled with cachinnatory convulsions; nor did his risible emotions subside until the entrance of the hung-beef restored him to recollection.” 

Paul Clifford is Bulwer-Lytton’s most famous novel because it begins with the line “It was a dark and stormy night,” and nowadays there’s an annual contest to see who can come up with the worst opening line of a novel (you don’t to write the rest of the book). 

To be fair, Bulwer-Lytton’s work was extremely popular during his lifetime, and he made a fortune from his novels. So who knows, maybe they’ll come back into favor at some point. But what about “cachinnatory”? It’s not entirely unique to Bulwer-Lytton; Henry Harford’s 1892 novel The Fan used it too, in describing his heroine’s visit to the London Zoo: “The laughing jackasses laughed their loudest, almost frightening her with their weird cachinnatory chorus.” And just in case you think the word is limited to British writers, Nathanial Hawthorne used it in Mosses from Old Manse in 1846: “Which threatened instant death on the slightest cachinnatory ndulgence.”

“Cachinnatory” means “pertaining to loud laughter.” It’s the adjective version of the noun “cachinnate,” which isn’t used any more often. “Cachinnate”, as you’ve probably guessed, means to laugh loudly. It comes from the Latin word “cachinnare”, which has the same meaning. It’s always been pretty obscure, but it’s not listed as obsolete, so somebody somewhere would seem to still be using it. It seems like it would be related to “cackle,” which can also mean laughing, but nope; “cackle” seems instead to be a word that’s used to resemble the sounds hens or geese make. 

There are other obscure words having to do with laughter, too. For example, “kench” also means to laugh loudly. This one isn’t associated with Latin at all; it’s from the Old English word “cencean” or “kankjan.” The Old English root word there is “kink”, which is also the basis of the word “chink” — but not the kind of “chink” that’s a crack or gap, like a “chink in his armor.” This “chink” is a gasp for breath, like you might do after laughing loudly. In 1767 Henry Brook used it that way in The Fool of Quality: “My Lord and Lady took such a chink of laughing, that it was some time before they could recover.”

The “chink” that’s a gap or crack might actually be related as well (nobody’s quite sure), because if something cracks (creating a chink), there can be a sharp sound associated with that, and maybe the sound reminded people of the kind of gasp that comes after laughing too hard. But on the other hand, a “chink” might also be a version of “chine”, which was a much older word for a crack or fissure. It seems that “chink” appeared in English in the 1500s with no clear association with any other words; there’s nothing like it in either Germanic or Romance languages. If “chink” is a version of “chine”, the “k” might have been added as a diminutive, so a “chine” was a big crack but a “chink” was a little one. The word is used that way today; a “chink in the wall” is a very small crack. You know, the kind you’d just cachinnate about.