'Narrow, Like the Walk of a Rope Dancer'

“Tread softly and circumspectly in this funambulatory Track and narrow Path of Goodness.”

That’s the opening sentence of Part I, Section 1, of Christian Morals by Sir Thomas Browne, published posthumously in 1716. I paused at the thirteen-letter adjective. I get fun and I get ambulatory. If I had to guess, I’d say it describes someone who derives inordinate pleasure from walking, but I would be wrong and the OED sets me straight: “of, relating to, or characteristic of tightrope or slack-rope walking.” Browne gets criticized for his exotic vocabulary, but he is seldom wrong in his usage. Funambulatory is nicely reiterated by narrow Path.

The Dictionary refers us to funambulus, a noun meaning tightrope walker. It comes straight from the Latin. Along with their bread and circuses, the Romans had Wallenda-esque performers who worked the high wire. Browne addresses Christian Morals to his children, urging them to follow the proverbial “straight and narrow” path. It recalls “A Letter to My Children,” Whittaker Chambers’ twenty-page foreword to Witness (1952), though written in a very different key.

In 1756, Dr. Johnson edited a second edition of Christian Morals, to which he appended his “Life of Browne.” Johnson’s own prose was plainer than Browne’s, though comparably Latinate. He writes:

“[I]n defence of [Browne’s] uncommon words and expressions, we must consider, that he had uncommon sentiments, and was not content to express in many words that idea for which any language could supply a single term.”

Browne is the seventy-third most frequently cited source in the OED, with 4,156 quotations. He is credited with coining 784 words and establishing the modern usage of more than 1,600 others. Johnson adds, with some disapproval:

“He fell into an age in which our language began to lose the stability which it had obtained in the time of Elizabeth; and was considered by every writer as a subject on which he might try his plastick skill, by moulding it according to his own fancy.”

Though funambulatory does show up in Johnson’s Dictionary: “narrow, like the walk of a rope dancer.”