Feb

2

Word Of The Week: February 2nd, 2008

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

February 2, 2008 |

This week’s word of the week: epexegesis.

Epexegesis means the addition of a word or words to clarify the implied meaning or the intention of a preceding word or sentence. It’s derived from two Greek words meaning “to explain” and “in addition to”.

In his short story The Great Automatic Grammatisator, about a young man who builds a machine that automatically writes short stories, Roald Dahl uses the word’s adverbial form brilliantly:

“There’s a trick nearly every writer uses, of inserting one long, obscure word into every story. This makes the reader think the man is very wise and clever. So I have the machine do the same thing. There’ll be a whole stack of long words stored away just for this purpose.”

“Where?”

“In the word-memory section,” he said epexegetically.


Comments

3 Comments so far

  1. maureen on February 2, 2008 6:55 pm

    It never hurts to learn a new word and I love it when the sounds important too!

  2. Liam Quin on February 3, 2008 1:40 am

    You example uses (in the last line) “epexegetically” rather than “exepegetically” — a typo, I assume :-)

    Liam

  3. Christopher Waldrop on February 6, 2008 4:08 pm

    Ack, there was a typo, and it was mine! The correct spelling is “epexegetically”–Mr. Dahl had it right. So much for me trying to show off my vocabulary. ;)

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