9. Cromulent: This is yet anther word for nonsense, but it’s thoroughly modern having been invented by David Samuel Cohen (a.k.a. David X. Cohen), an American television writer, head writer and executive producer of Futurama and scriptwriter for the Simpsons. It first occurs in the following exchange from one of the Simpson’s episode, Lisa the Iconoclast. In it, the following exchange occurs:
Edna: Embiggens? I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield.
Ms. Hoover: I don’t know why. It’s a perfectly cromulent word.
Both embiggen and cromulent are newly coined words, but cromulent has passed into the language. It also has a very specific meaning. Its use is ironical only. It means legitimate, and hence implies a complete lack of legitimacy. Cromulent is one of the few words that is self-referential. The word cromulent is undoubtedly cromulent.
10. Pasquinade: A pasquinade is a parody either in verse or prose, often anonymous. The word comes from the Pasquin, an old and damaged dug-up-from-long-ago statue in Rome that was erected at the corner of Piazza di Pasquino at the beginning of the sixteen century. On Saint Mark’s Day (April 25th), the marble torso of the Pasquin was dressed in a toga, and anonymous epigrams in Latin were attached to it, usually criticizing local notables from the government or the church. As the age of printing had arrived, the pasquinades were collected and published annually. So the original pasquinade was an acerbic epigram, but the word has come to mean a parody of any kind.
A poem that has probably given birth to more pasquinades than any other is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha. The poem’s galloping meter is probably responsible for this:
By the shores of Gitchee Gumee
By the shining Big-Sea-Water
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them;
…
It cries out longingly for a pasquinade:
Make the next line like the last one,
Make the words go bouncing onward,
Make it all go rolling forward,
Keep on writing till you’re so bored,
That you’re forced to smash the keyboard.
Lewis Carroll wrote a famous pasquinade of Hiawatha, called Hiawatha’s Photographing, but in my opinion, the best pasquinade of the poem was anonymous. It is this:
He killed the noble Mudjokivis.
Of the skin he made him mittens,
Made them with the fur side inside,
Made them with the skin side outside.
He, to get the warm side inside,
Put the inside skin side outside;
He, to get the cold side outside,
Put the warm side fur side inside.
That’s why he put the fur side inside,
Why he put the skin side outside,
Why he turned them inside outside.
(from Carolyn Wells’ Parody Anthology)
10 Curse Words You Don’t Know
10 Insulting Words You Don’t Know
10 Words You Didn’t Know Were Eponyms
10 Words You Don’t Know With Limericks
10 Units of Measure You Don’t Know
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~ Master Yoda
