Monday, March 2, 2009

It's the Small Joys That Make Irregular Employment Worth It

It's the small joys that make irregular employment worth it. For example, while tutoring tonight I had a student who tried to make up a great word: multaplicitus. While I told him I was pretty sure that no such word existed (multitudinous was the word I suggested he was probably looking for), I nonetheless liked the word he invented. Here's my suggested definition for it:

multaplicitus: adjective, derived from combining "multiple" and "duplicitous," describes anything which employs a high number of examples in support of something which is nonetheless false

Perhaps the spelling should be regularized to multiplicitous? What do you think? Any takers for making this an actual neologism? If you can come up with a better definition, too, leave it in the comments section. (Something involving Tacitus maybe was my only other thought, but I'm sure you can do better.)

No comments:

Post a Comment