Fidimplicitary: A Word for These Times

One of my weekly pleasures is Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words Newsletter, available for (free) subscription via worldwidewords.org, but footnoted with this chastening injunction:

This formatted version of the newsletter is intended for the private use of subscribers. Please do not reproduce it in this format in whole or part on any Web site or post a link to this page without the prior permission of the author.

OK, fair enough, that’s how MQ wants it, and I encourage you to subscribe, for sure. Each week brings several gems of Wordstuff, just the thing for those of us who fancy a bit of orotundity now and again. This week’s toothsome Weird Word is Fidimplicitary, which Quinion glosses as “Putting one’s faith in someone else’s views”, a phenomenon not unknown in campaign season… He goes on to trace the word to a coinage of Sir Thomas Urquhart (1652), reprinted (thanks to Google Print) in The Works of Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty, Knight (“92 copies printed, some on large paper”, this one from Oxford’s library), in a section headlined as “Logopandecteision” (page image). Here’s some of the text, with especially juicy bits bolded:

60. If any officious critick will run to the omnipotency of God for framing more worlds, according to the common saying, Nothing is impossible to God, that implies not a contradiction, so must he have recourse to the same omnipotent power for furnishing of man with other speech-tools then his tongue, throat, roof of the mouth, lips, and teeth, before the contexture of another universal language can be warped.

61. That I should hit upon the invention of that, for the furtherance of philosophy, and other disciplines and arts, which never hitherto hath been so much as thought upon by any, and that in a matter of so great extent, as the expressing of all the things in the world, both in themselves, actions, ways of doing, situation, pendicles, relations, connexions, pathetick interpositions, and all other appurtenances to a perfect elocution, without being beholding to any language in the world ; insomuch as one word will hardly be believed by our fidimplicitary gown-men, who, satisfied with their predecessors’ contrivances, and taking all things litterally, without examination, blaterate, to the nauseating even of vulgar ears, those exotick proverbs, There is no new thing under the sun, Nihil dictum quod non dictum prius, and, Beware of philosophers; authorizating this on Paul, the first on Solomon, and the other on Terence.

62. But, poor souls, they understand not that in the passage of Solomon is meant, that there is no innovation in the essence of natural things ; all transmutations on the same matter, being into forms, which, as they differ from some, so have an essential uniformity with others pre-existent in the same kind.

63. And when it was said by Paul, Beware of philosophers, he meant such sophisters as themselves, who, under the vizzard of I know not what, corrupt the channels of the truth, and pervert all philosophy and learning.

64. As for the sayings of Terence, whether Scipio couched them or himself, they ought to be inferred rather as testimonies of neat Latine, then for asserting of infallible verities.

65. If there hath been no new thing under the sun, according to the adulterate sense of those pristinary lobcocks, how comes the invention of syllogisms to be attributed to Aristotle, that of the sphere to Archimedes, and logarithms to Napier? It was not Swart, then, and Gertudenburg, that found out gunpowder and the art of printing, for these two men lived after the decease of Solomon.

Quinion points to an article entitled “Fragment of a Literary Romance”, in an issue of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine from 1817, for another instance of fidimplicitary, this time modifying coxcombs, they “who fill our too credulous ears with their quisquiliary deblaterations”, and Google Print comes through again with the relevant passage:

([says the author] I have attempted here an imitation of the extraordinary style of Sir Thomas Urquhart, a man of genius, as none who have perused his inimitable translation of part of Rabelais will be disposed to deny, or his extraordinary account of the murder of the admirable Crichton, in his tracts (under the one named the Jewel), but in other respects of the most ridiculous pretensions, and these conveyed in the most quaint and unintelligible phraseology, as every one who has turned over his Introduction to a Universal Language will most readily allow. Most of the singular words in this speech of Sir Thomas are either sanctioned by his own authority, or coined according to those rules he seems to have adopted. both orderly digested and aptly conceived.)

“Truly, sieur,” replied Sir Thomas, “your observations on those antiquated times, as they are now called by those shallow and fidimplicitary coxcombs, who fill our too credulous ears with their quisquiliary deblaterations, appear to me both orderly digested and aptly conceived. We have lived, sir, in those great eras, those commendable measurements of the regent of this diurnal microcosme, those exalted periodi, by which the sagacity of the sapient philosophunculi of this rotundal habitation, hath measured the unceasing rotations of the caelicolary spheroids, in those times, seignior, when the old were respected, arid in all estimation —the young sweet and judicious —the married women decorous rather than decorated, grave as well as gravidae —the virgins pure and pitiful —the youth becomingly silent, and more given to listen to the legislative or literatorie discussions of their elders, than to any cunning tricks or vulpicularic conundrums, to the jeers, gibes, mopes, quips, jests, or jerks of their simiatick companions. Gallantry, sir, (said he, turning to me) or the exalted science of demulceating the amiable reservedness, and overcoming the attractive pudicity, of the gentler sex, by the display of rare and excellent endowments [sic!], was a discipline worthy of the accomplished chevaliers of these most memorable eras.”

links for 2008-02-29

Gobsmacked by Mary Ann Evans

Now and again I enjoy glimpses of glorious futures of information access. Today’s case in point was inspired by the morning bathroom reading of the Introduction to George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life, in which Thomas Noble quotes the opening passage of an essay George Eliot published in Westminster Review in October 1855 (bolding especially choice bits):

GIVEN, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence and great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and reputation in English society ? Where is that Goshen of mediocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given piety? Let such a man become an evangelical preacher; he will then find it possible to reconcile small ability with great ambition, superficial knowledge with the prestige of erudition, a middling morale with a high reputation for sanctity.

My god but that woman could write. I got to wondering if I could lay my hands on the whole text of the article (“EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR CUMMING”), and a few quick searches brought me a Google Books scan from George Eliot’s Works, which was almost completely satisfactory… the penultimate page of the article was illegible, but Google offered a “Flag this page as unreadable” link, and politely thanked me for reporting the deficiency.

For those with a taste for literary skewering, I continue with some more (winkled out from the pdf thanks to copyable plain text view), but heartily urge download of the whole text. You’ll find this not irrelevant to our present circumstances:

Let him shun practical extremes and be ultra only in what is purely theoretic: let him be stringent on predestination, but latitudinarian on fasting; unflinching in insisting on the Eternity of punishment, but diffident of curtailing the substantial comforts of Time; ardent and imaginative on the pre-millennial advent of Christ, but cold and cautious towards every other infringement of the status quo. Let him fish for souls, not with the bait of inconvenient singularity, but with the drag-net of comfortable conformity. Let him be hard and literal in his interpretation only when he wants to hurl texts at the heads of unbelievers and adversaries; but when the letter of the Scriptures presses too closely on the genteel Christianity of the nineteenth century, let him use his spiritualizing alembic and disperse it into impalpable ether. Let him preach less of Christ than of Antichrist; let him be less definite in showing what sin is than in showing who is the Man of Sin, less expansive on the blessedness of faith than on the accursedness of infidelity. Above all, let him set up as an interpreter of prophecy, and rival Moore’s Almanack in the prediction of political events, tickling the interest of hearers who are but moderately spiritual by showing how the Holy Spirit has dictated problems and charades for their benefit, and how, if they are ingenious enough to solve these, they may have their Christian graces nourished by learning precisely to whom they may point as the “horn that had eyes,” “the lying prophet,” and the “unclean spirits.” In this way he will draw men to him by the strong chords of their passions, made reason-proof by being baptized with the name of piety. In this way he may gain a metropolitan pulpit; the avenues to his church will be as crowded as the passages to the opera; he has but to print his prophetic sermons and bind them in lilac and gold, and they will adorn the drawing-room table of all evangelical ladies, who will regard as a sort of pious “light reading” the demonstration that the prophecy of the locusts whose sting is in their tail is fulfilled in the fact of the Turkish commander’s having taken a horse’s tail for his standard, and that the French are the very frogs predicted in the Revelations.

links for 2008-02-26