This is for Stephanie
Being that person who first defined the word for me, after I had long pondered the eponymous title and plot of the tale of the death of Ermintrude Inch by Arthur C. Clarke.
Defenestration
(by R. P. Lister)
I once had the honour of meeting a philosopher called McIndoe
Who had once had the honour of being flung out of an upstairs window.
During his flight, he said, he commenced an interesting train of speculation
On why there happened to be such a word as defenestration.
There is not, he said, a special word for being rolled down a roof into a gutter;
There is no verb to describe the action of beating a man to death with a putter;
No adjective exists to qualify a man bound to the buffer of the 12.10 to Ealing,
No abstract noun to mollify a man hung upside down by his ankles from the ceiling.
Why, then, of all the possible offences so distressing to humanitarians,
Should this one alone have caught the attention of the verbarians?
I concluded (said McIndoe) that the incidence of logodaedaly was purely adventitious.
About a thirtieth of a second later, I landed in a bush that my great-aunt brought back from Mauritius.
I am aware (he said) that defenestration is not limited to the flinging of men through the window.
On this occasion, however, it was so limited, the object defenestrated being, I, the philosopher, McIndoe.
Though perhaps Ermintrude did not die, but landed on a passing bush. Or something. The story is unclear on that point.
"Logodaedaly" means arbitrary or capricious coinage of words. A related term is "Inkhorn word" (a word so long that it takes a whole horn of ink to write it). While not sharing the precise meaning, "Inkhorn word" and its related (though far more Latinate) adjective "sesquipedalian" (a word a foot and a half long) are, I feel, in the spirit of "Logodaedaly".
Defenestration
(by R. P. Lister)
I once had the honour of meeting a philosopher called McIndoe
Who had once had the honour of being flung out of an upstairs window.
During his flight, he said, he commenced an interesting train of speculation
On why there happened to be such a word as defenestration.
There is not, he said, a special word for being rolled down a roof into a gutter;
There is no verb to describe the action of beating a man to death with a putter;
No adjective exists to qualify a man bound to the buffer of the 12.10 to Ealing,
No abstract noun to mollify a man hung upside down by his ankles from the ceiling.
Why, then, of all the possible offences so distressing to humanitarians,
Should this one alone have caught the attention of the verbarians?
I concluded (said McIndoe) that the incidence of logodaedaly was purely adventitious.
About a thirtieth of a second later, I landed in a bush that my great-aunt brought back from Mauritius.
I am aware (he said) that defenestration is not limited to the flinging of men through the window.
On this occasion, however, it was so limited, the object defenestrated being, I, the philosopher, McIndoe.
Though perhaps Ermintrude did not die, but landed on a passing bush. Or something. The story is unclear on that point.
"Logodaedaly" means arbitrary or capricious coinage of words. A related term is "Inkhorn word" (a word so long that it takes a whole horn of ink to write it). While not sharing the precise meaning, "Inkhorn word" and its related (though far more Latinate) adjective "sesquipedalian" (a word a foot and a half long) are, I feel, in the spirit of "Logodaedaly".
posted by theamazingcatherine | 4:08 pm
6 Comments:
I, too, was introduced to "defenistration" by my sibling - I think when I was an undergraduate. I had to look it up in the dictionary before I would believe there was a word for such a specific act.
The MW dictionary (OED not available online, sigh) doesn't give a date for "defenistrate", but amusingly the Google Ads were all for hotels in Prague.
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=defenestrate
Ah yes, the Defenestration of the Privy Council. (Or so I have heard.)
Michael,
OED is too online. You just have to be a member of Wellington City Libraries (it's linked off their web page and requires a library card number and last name to access).
Anyway - the requisite entry:
The action of throwing out of a window.
Defenestration of Prague, the action of the Bohemian insurgents who, on the 21st of May 1618, broke up a meeting of Imperial commissioners and deputies of the States, held in the castle of the Hradshin, and threw two of the commissioners and their secretary out of the window; this formed the prelude to the Thirty Years' War.
1620 Reliq. Wotton. (1672) 507 A man saued at the time of the defenestration. 1837 SOUTHEY Lett. (1856) IV. 521, I much admire the manner in which the defenestration is shown [in a picture]. 1863 NEALE Ess. Liturgiol. 238 Which commencing at the defenestration of Prague..terminated in the peace of Westphalia.
Hence (as a back-formation) de{sm}fenestrate v. trans. (usu. joc.), to throw out of a window; de{sm}fenestrated ppl. a. (in quot. 1927 punningly = ‘windowless’?).
1620 H. WOTTON Lett. (1907) II. 199 Two of the defenestrated men. 1915 Lit. Digest 20 Mar. 668/3 The word defenestrate means ‘to throw out of the window’..but there is no good authority for its use. 1927 C. CONNOLLY Let. 27 Apr. in Romantic Friendship (1975) 298 Prague..seemed a good place, gloomy and defenestrated. 1958 J. C. HEROLD Mistress to Age (1959) xii. 246 ‘I am like the Irishman who kept coming back until he was thrown out of a fourth-floor window.’ So confident was she of not being defenestrated that she rented a house at 540 rue de Lille. 1974 Publishers Weekly 30 Sept. 52/2 Anne Ramsdell, a brilliant math professor at Oxford,..escapes death by stabbing but is thrown out of her third-story window... Anne meets and falls in love with the man who had defenestrated her at Oxford.
Thanks. I'm confused by their use of dates, but what I really wanted to discover was whether the word predated the deed. The defenestration was in 1618, and OED's first recorded use of the word is either 1620 or 1672, so it answers my question either way.
But "sesquipedalian" is just such a great word.
And to jump on the train of "when we learned the word 'defenestration': I learned it in German class. For the German word for window is Fenster, and my teacher is verbose and liked to tell us funny etymology stories to help us remember our vocab.
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