Back at Xmastime, I found out that Charles Dickens -- who I blame for the ongoing
ChristmasCarolization of Xmas, by which I mean that as time goes on, we retreat more and more from writing any original Xmas stories and...
...and I just realized that everyone is going "
Hey, uh, you are aware that Xmas was like a zillion months ago, right?" so don't worry, this is NOT a Xmas post, I'm going somewhere with this...
...we retreat from writing original Xmas stories and just rewrite
A Christmas Carol over and over, replacing Ebeneezer Scrooge with whatever character
we have, which is why next year I'll be unveiling
A 2 Frogs' Xmas Carol, but anyway, that's not my point.
My point is that this year I found out that Dickens wrote
a Xmas story every single year, something you, like me, probably never knew. Having found that out, this past Xmas I got my hands on them and read a few of them, and I can report that
(A) Xmas was actually kind of a sort of Hallowe'en back in the olden days, judging by the number of eerie Xmas stories people wrote. Between some of Dickens' weird stuff and Robert Louis Stevenson's
Markheim, Xmas started out being pretty spooky, so really if you want a traditional Xmas you should watch
The Nightmare Before Xmas, but
(B) Dickens wasn't above making up a word and using it for no reason whatsoever.
That latter is the point of this post, so sorry about all that Xmas stuff introducing it.
The word in question is
sassigassity. Dickens uses it in his story
A Christmas Tree, in which he stares into a Christmas tree, looking at the ornaments and remembering all the prior Xmases, going back to when he was a kid. It begins with this memory of childhood toys:
All toys at first, I find. Up yonder, among the green holly and red berries, is the Tumbler with his hands in his pockets, who wouldn't lie down, but whenever he was put upon the floor, persisted in rolling his fat body about, until he rolled himself still, and brought those lobster eyes of his to bear upon me--when I affected to laugh very much, but in my heart of hearts was extremely doubtful of him. Close beside him is that infernal snuff-box, out of which there sprang a demoniacal Counsellor in a black gown, with an obnoxious head of hair, and a red cloth mouth, wide open, who was not to be endured on any terms, but could not be put away either; for he used suddenly, in a highly magnified state, to fly out of Mammoth Snuff-boxes in dreams, when least expected. Nor is the frog with cobbler's wax on his tail, far off; for there was no knowing where he wouldn't jump; and when he flew over the candle, and came upon one's hand with that spotted back--red on a green ground--he was horrible. The cardboard lady in a blue-silk skirt, who was stood up against the candlestick to dance, and whom I see on the same branch, was milder, and was beautiful; but I can't say as much for the larger cardboard man, who used to be hung against the wall and pulled by a string; there was a sinister expression in that nose of his; and when he got his legs round his neck (which he very often did), he was ghastly, and not a creature to be alone with.
Ha ha! Cherished memories. Then, through a series of other frightful images, Dickens begins to remember books he has been given for Xmas as presents, and gets to this one:
And now, I see a wonderful row of little lights rise smoothly out of the ground, before a vast green curtain. Now, a bell rings--a magic bell, which still sounds in my ears unlike all other bells--and music plays, amidst a buzz of voices, and a fragrant smell of orange-peel and oil. Anon, the magic bell commands the music to cease, and the great green curtain rolls itself up majestically, and The Play begins! The devoted dog of Montargis avenges the death of his master, foully murdered in the Forest of Bondy; and a humorous Peasant with a red nose and a very little hat, whom I take from this hour forth to my bosom as a friend (I think he was a Waiter or an Hostler at a village Inn, but many years have passed since he and I have met), remarks that the sassigassity of that dog is indeed surprising; and evermore this jocular conceit will live in my remembrance fresh and unfading, overtopping all possible jokes, unto the end of time.
So when I came to that part I thought "
Hey! Sassigassity! That's a new word and now it's part of the 15,842 new words I am going to learn in my lifetime," and so I looked it up, only to find that
it has no meaning.
But more than that-- more than being a made up word, it's a special kind of
made up word. Because as I looked around for
sassigassity to see if the meaning I was getting from the context was right, I found this phrase:
hapax legomenon
which is actually
not the thing you say to Superman's archenemy to send him back to his own dimension, but it's okay if you confused the two.
A
hapax legomenon is a word that occurs
only once in a context, whatever that context is. The most common context for a
hapax is that it appear only once, say,
in the complete set of an author's works, which is what
sassigassity is for Dickens: it is a word that appears
one single time in all his writings (and, apparently, in all of literature).
Here's what's even
weirder about hapaxes: they're very common, and there's even a law that describes how they occur:
Zipf's law, which is this:
Zipf's law states that given some corpus of natural language utterances, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. Thus the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, etc. For example, in the Brown Corpus of American English text, the word "the" is the most frequently occurring word, and by itself accounts for nearly 7% of all word occurrences (69,971 out of slightly over 1 million). True to Zipf's Law, the second-place word "of" accounts for slightly over 3.5% of words (36,411 occurrences), followed by "and" (28,852). Only 135 vocabulary items are needed to account for half the Brown Corpus
I'm not sure how that's
helpful, but now I know that
pizza will appear in my writings twice as often as the next most common word (
leftover pizza, I assume.)
Hapaxes are different than
nonce words, which are words you make up for a single occasion, and which then may be adopted or not.
Quark was a nonce word, made up by James Joyce. and only later used to apply to the subatomic particle.
Just to finish this off, consider this word:
Honorificabilitudinitatibus
That word is somewhat remarkable. Coined by Shakespeare, it was used in
Love's Labour Lost, and means "
the state of being able to achieve honors," and not only is it a
nonce word, but it is also a
hapax legomenon, as Shakespeare used it only one time, but beyond
those two it is also the longest word in the English language featuring only alternating consonants and vowels.
Use it in a sentence today!
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