"Pedantic Humour"

From A Dictionary of Modern English Usage by H.W. Fowler, 1927 (p. 426-27):

PEDANTIC HUMOUR. No essential distinction is intended between this & POLYSYLLABIC HUMOUR; one or the other name is more appropriate to particular specimens, & the two headings are therefore useful for reference; but they are manifestations of the same impulse, & the few remarks needed may be made here for both. A warning is necessary, because we have all of us, except the abnormally stupid, been pedantic humourists in our time. We spend much of our childhood picking up a vocabulary; we like to air our latest finds; we discover that our elders are tickled when we come out with a new name that they thought beyond us; we devote some pains to tickling them further; & there we are, pedants & polysyllabists all. The impulse is healthy for children [and undergrads] & nearly universal--which is just why warning is necessary; for among so many there will always be some who fail to realize that the clever habit applauded at home will make them insufferable abroad. Most of those who are capable of writing well enough to find readers do learn with more or less of delay that playful use of long or learned words is a one-sided game boring the reader more than it pleases the writer, that the impulse to it is a danger-signal--for there must be something wrong with what they are saying if it needs recommending by such puerilities--, & that yielding to the impulse is a confession of failure. But now & then even an able writer will go on believing that the incongruity between simple things to be said & out-of-the-way words to say them in had a perennial charm; it has, for the reader who never outgrows hobbledehoyhood; but for the rest of us it is dreary indeed. It is possible that acquaintance with such labels as pedantic & polysyllabic humour may help to shorten the time that it takes to cure a weakness incident to youth.

An elementary example or two should be given. The words homeopathic (small or minute), sartorial (of clothes), interregnum (gap), are familiar ones:--To introduce 'Lords of Parliament' in such homeopathic doses as to leave a preponderating power in the hands of those who enjoy a merely hereditary title./While we were motoring out to the station I took stock of his sartorial aspect, which had changed somewhat since we parted./In his vehement action his breeches fall down & his waistcoast runs up, so that there is a great interregnum.

These words are, like most that are much used in humour of either kind, both pedantic & polysyllabic. A few specimens that cannot be described as polysyllabic are added here, & for the larger class of long words the article POLYSYLLABIC HUMOUR should be consulted:--ablution; aforesaid; beverage; bivalve (the succulent); caloric; cuticle; digit; domestics; eke (adv.); ergo; erstwhile; felicide; nasal organ; neighbourhood (in the n. of,=about); nether garments; optic (eye); parlous; vulpicide.

I got this book over the summer of 2013 at Second Story Books in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C. It's fun to read, in part because of its language--this entry in particular made me laugh because for all its degradation of wordiness, it's not very concise itself. But perhaps more importantly, I think this book provides a fascinating commentary on linguistic change, and a very specific (i.e., from an old white educated man's perspective) snapshot of where the English language was less than a hundred years ago.

Maybe one day I'll write my own dictionary of English usage. For now, though, I should probably just stick to regurgitating others' ideas on the Internet.

I swear I didn't make that up.