'An Occasion for Festive Processions"

“Others will balk at his sometimes extravagant vocabulary; words such as ‘amphisbaenic’ or ‘labarum’ or ‘ithyphallic’ will send them ‘scurrying’ to their dictionaries (why do they always ‘scurry’ or even ‘scuttle’? A new word, rightly used, should be an occasion for festive processions).” 

Eric Ormsby’s assault on linguistic anemia comes in his review of Recollected Poems by the Canadian writer Daryl Hine (1936-2012). The problem is not writers wielding a lavish vocabulary. Rather, it’s a question of motive. If they’re just showing off (Exhibit A: Alexander Theroux) and not serving the purposes of the work or its readers, it’s probably best to knock it off. They bore most readers and encourage those who pretend to appreciate the word-bloated self-advertisements.

 

A larger vocabulary implies a larger world. Ormsby is right: those who would object to Hine’s word choice would use a clichéd phrase and resort to a clichéd word like “scurry.” Think of the writer among Hine’s near-contemporaries who commanded vast, jewel-like vocabularies -- Vladimir Nabokov, James Merrill, Geoffrey Hill and Ormsby himself. As to the three “extravagant” words cited by Ormsby, here are their definitions, courtesy of the Oxford English Dictionary:

 

Amphisbaenic, the adjective form of the noun amphisbæna: “a fabled serpent of the ancients, with a head at each end, and able to move in either direction: retained by the moderns as a poetical conception.” You’ll find it in Pope, Shelley and Tennyson.

 

Labarum: “the imperial standard of Constantine the Great (A.D. 306–337), which bore military symbols of the Roman Empire fused with Christian symbolic imagery (in later representations generally the Christogram (☧)); (hence more generally) any standard or banner. Also occasionally: the Christogram itself.”

 

Ithyphallic: “Pertaining to or associated with the phallus carried in procession at the Bacchic festivals; spec. composed in the metre of the Bacchic hymns (the trochaic dimeter brachycatalectic).”

 

All are rooted in Latin and/or Greek. Hine trained as a classicist and published translations of Ovid, Hesiod, Theocritus and selections from The Greek Anthology.

 

[Ormsby’s 2009 review of Hine’s Recollected Poems: 1951-2004 (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2007), “Ultimate Distillations,” is collected in Fine Incisions: Essays on Poetry and Place, (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2011).]