Christmas is just recently past, and who the dickens do we think of at Christmas? Fast as the dickens, Charles Dickens comes to mind!
The various “dickens” phrases, though, have nothing to do with Charles himself; they predate him by quite a lot. Shakespeare used one in “The Merry Wives of Windsor”: “I cannot tell what the dickens his name is…”. “Dickins” back in the 1500s was a euphemism for the Devil, and saying “what the dickens” was a mild oath, just like “what the deuce” was (“deuce” being yet another euphemism for the Devil). It’s the sort of curse that would have been far too mild for any self-respecting mastigophore to use.
“Mastigophore” is a spectacularly obscure word adapted from the Greek “mastigophoros”, which comes from “mastix” (whip) and “-phoros” (carrying). A “mastigophore” is a guy carrying a whip — and if he was carrying the whip to use it, he probably talked a blue streak as well. “Mastigophore” was first used, as far as anybody knows, on December 12, 1812 in a letter from Samuel Parr to Charles Burney. He was talking about a teacher (which he referred to as a “pedagogue;” that’s the sort of writer Parr seems to have been) who liked corporal punishment a bit too much. The word occasionally appeared since, but not since the 1800s. It isn’t nearly as obscure, though, as “exadverse,” “nudiustertian,” “perquisquilian,” and “nugiperous.”
All of those words come from a single source: Nathaniel Ward. He was a minister in England in the early 1600s, then settled in the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1634. When he got to North America he wrote “The Simple Cobbler,” a book published in 1647. As a Puritan, he was offended by practically everything, but especially by women’s fashions:
“Whatever Christianity or civility will allow, I can afford … but when I hear a nugiperous gentledame inquire what dress the Queen is in this week … I look at her as the very gizzard of a trifle, the product of a quarter of a cipher, the epitome of nothing, fitter to be kickt, if she were of a kickable substance than either honoured or humoured.”
Up until right here, that might have been the one and only appearance of “nugiperous” in English. Ward made it up, and it’s not entirely clear from that context exactly what he thought it meant. The best clue is that it’s probably based on the Latin “nugae,” which means nonsense, so it probably means something like “silly” or “nonsensical.” He did a better job with the definitions of some of his other invented words; “exadverse” means directly opposite, “nudiustertian” is the day before yesterday, “and perquisquilian” means completely worthless. Unfortunately for Ward, even more complete definitions didn’t improve the popularity of the words he coined. Not a single one of them ever caught on. Possibly the most interesting part of Ward’s story doesn’t even involve Ward himself — it’s trying to determine why the Oxford English Dictionary includes words only ever used by one person — which, by the way, they know perfectly well, because they make note of it in the definitions!
