Hello. My name is Max and I’m a logophile.
Don’t fret, it just means I’m a lover of words. Logo is Greek for word and philos means love.
(I’m also a bit of a lexophile, someone who likes to play with words.)
My condition means I’m also a librocubularist — I love reading in bed (libro is Latin for book and cubiculum is bedroom).
But I’m most definitely not sesquipedalian, meaning the tendency to use long words. It comes from Horatio’s sesquipedalia verba, words that are a foot-and-a-half long.
I often refer to cheats, crooks and sociopathic know-it-alls as charlatans. Like Mzwanele Manyi (ex-ANC, ex-Gupta, now EFF MP).
The French borrowed the word from the Italians: ciarlatano, literally meaning “inhabitants of Cerreto”, a town in Italy.
During the Middle Ages, the people of Cerreto specialised in exploiting people’s gullibility by diagnosing their ailments and prescribing fake medicine. Nowadays a charlatan means more than just a quack.
(“Quack” comes from the Dutch kwakzalver — Afrikaans kwaksalwer — referring to someone in ancient times who treated the sick with home remedies. It was first used in English in the 1630s.)
A charlatan is different from a smart alec, an obnoxious would-be clever person, the kind who would respond to your question “what’s up?” with “the sky”. The term most likely refers to a notorious conman and pimp in New York in the 1840s, Alec Hoag.
I’m waiting for the opportunity to call some or other politician a poltroon. It derives from the Italian poltrone, meaning a lazy, useless or cowardly person (from poltro = bed). The French appropriated the word as poultron, also spelt poltron.
Is there a Panglossian in your circle of friends or acquaintances? It is someone who is excessively optimistic despite dire circumstances. It comes from the character Dr Pangloss (Panglosse in French), the old, obsessively optimistic teacher in Voltaire’s philosophical satire Candide.
So, someone who still believes that South Africa in 2023 is in fine shape and governed splendidly suffers from Panglossian thinking.
A softer word for a Panglossian is a Pollyanna, from the eternally cheerful and optimistic orphan in Eleanor H Porter’s 1913 novel, Pollyanna.
– Max du Preez
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