Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Sesquipedalian Pedant

I saw a few minutes of the movie, Love Happens, the other night. In it, the characters look up some words in the dictionary.

I was intrigued by one of them and looked it up myself. It is not in the pocket dictionary, so I googled it. It came up in wikipedia, but since that isn't very authoritarian, I pulled out the Deluxe Unabridged Dictionary.

Sesquipedalian. adj. characterized by the use of big words; or measuring a foot and a half long.

Pedantic. adj. artificially or exagerratedly scholarly.

Whilst googling, I discovered that others had made the same mistake I had at first. There were no quotations which included the word, sesquipedalian, but there were some with "sesquipedantic," which I would venture to guess is not a word. It is not in my unabridged dictionary.

If you are a pedant, or pedantic, your language is probably sesquipedalian.

The philolog is not pedantic and this blog is never sequipedalian. The philolog actually prefers monosyllablic words and has written many blogs about them.

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