#210716 - 05/02/13 03:44 PM
squire pedant
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LukeJavan8
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Land of the Flat Water
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Diction Airy
In 1856 Samuel Hoshour reflected that students might learn new words more easily if they were presented in context rather than in long gray lists of definitions. The result was Letters to Squire Pedant, an imaginary correspondence salted with ten-dollar vocabulary words:
Dear Sir, At my decession from you; your final alloquy, and concinnous deport laid me under a reasonable obstriction to impart to you, a pantography of the occidental domain upon which I had placed my ophthalmic organs. I now merge my plumous implement of chirography into the atramental fluid, to exonerate myself of that obstriction. From my earliest juvenility, I possessed an indomitable proclivity to lead those that are given to the lection of my lucubrations, to the inception of occurrences. And it would be a dilucid evagation from my accustomary route, would I not now insist upon a regression of your mind to the locality where we imparted mutual valedictions.
Unfortunately, he gets a bit carried away. “Longevous Sir,” begins Letter IV, “The day sequacious to the vesper on which I effectuated in a certain cabaret an exsiccation of my habiliments by torrefaction, was not very inservient to the progress of a pedestrious emigrant.”
Doesn't your tongue just drool to read this aloud?
----please, draw me a sheep----
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#211179 - 05/27/13 10:21 AM
Re: squire pedant
[Re: LukeJavan8]
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Faldage
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#211181 - 05/27/13 04:09 PM
Re: squire pedant
[Re: Faldage]
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LukeJavan8
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If only the legal system would adhere to your dictum, as well as those who write the "fine print".
----please, draw me a sheep----
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#211187 - 05/27/13 08:15 PM
Re: squire pedant
[Re: tsuwm]
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tsuwm
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this too shall pass
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(General) Lew Wallace, author of Ben Hur, wrote in his autobiography of having S. Hoshour as a tutor:
""This, you see, is a story in words of five syllables. I wrote it to show the absurdity of big words so striven after by young writers, and, for the matter of that, by many old ones as well." Taking another book, he selected a passage and had me read it aloud, saying, at the conclusion, "How clear and simple that is! Now try 'Altisonant' again." I tried, but gave it up."
- Lew Wallace quoting Professor Samuel K. Hoshour (the man behind Lorenzo Altisonant), his private teacher for a period, in: Lew Wallace: An Autobiography (1906)
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#211188 - 05/27/13 08:28 PM
Re: squire pedant
[Re: tsuwm]
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tsuwm
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this too shall pass
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Hoshour evidently had it on good authority that old-style preachers actually talked this way:
the worthless word for the day is: humicubation
[fr. L. humi, on the ground + cubare, to lie down]
/hyu mik yoo BAY shun/ obs., rare
lying on the ground, especially in penitence or humiliation
"Fasting and sackcloth, and ashes, and tears, and
humicubations, used to be companions of Repentance."
- Bp. John Bramhall, Hobbes' Animadversions (1658)
"He is afraid, that 'this doctrine' of fasting, and
mourning, and tears, and humicubation, and sackcloth,
and ashes, 'pertaineth to the establishment of Romish
penance.'"
- Bp. Bramhall, ibid.
"I had to submit to humicubations in abatures during
my pernoctations..."
- S. K. Hoshour, Letters to Squire Pedant (1856)
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