Hildegarde

This morning I learned a new word–emphyteutic, as in “an emphyteutic lease.”

I learned it because I looked it up, stopping my day at the beginning to hit the dictionary when a short paragraph I was reading hit me with the thing, and I couldn’t remember ever having seen it before.

An emphyteutic lease is a very long term one–99 years, say, or even forever–that sometimes comes with requirements that the tenants improve the property and do other services for the landlord.

It was a common arrangement in the disintegrating Byzantine empire of the 7th and later centuries.

It is a much less common arrangement now, but it exists as a category in our law and in English common law, and the English are fairly entranced with the idea.  You can still buy 99 year leases for London real estate, and then sell the remainder of that lease as if you were selling a house.

In case you’re wondering what the point of all this–I don’t have a point about emphyteutic leases. 

I did find it interesting that there is actually a word for an arrangement I’d known about for years.  You have to be very careful, if you’re buying real estate in London, to make sure you’re looking at freeholds and not leases.

Although lots of Londoners like the leases.  Americans, not so much.

My point is that a word came along that I had never sen before, and I learned it because it was there to learn, and I liked learning it, even though the likelihood is great that I will never again need it in my life.

The paragraph I read was in a book about the Byzantine empire that I’m using to tide myself over until I can get to something else. 

The books is a volume in one of those ambitious publishing programs some houses do.  This one has to do with an overall short picture of various eras in various places–Medieval Italy, the Byzantine Empire, I don’t remember what else–meant for a general reader, and accompanied by lots and lots and lots of color plates and black and white photographs both.

I run into these projects every once in a while, and sometimes they can be very helpful.  I have a wonderful little book on Piero della Francesca that includes an essay by one of the Huxleys and, yet again, all those color plates.

This particular book isn’t as interesting as the one on Piero della Francesca, but it’s also not from the same publishing program.

What it is is the kind of generalist overview history that makes most people fall asleep–here’s how the city was run, here’s what the farmers did, here’s a quick overview of a few centuries in which wars and palace intrigues resulted in the change of emperor every year or two.

And, in Byzantium, these intrigues and assassinations occured in little groups of people with clumping names, so you have people named Constantine, Constantius and Constans all battling it out for who would become Emperor until you have to take notes to know who is who.

And even then you’re not 100% sure.

I am not, as you can tell, all that interested in the book.

But I am interested in the word, and that puzzles me in a way.  I’m always interested in the words, and over the years that has not only “expanded my vocabulary” but done it in a way where I have sometimes become less clear to the people around me.

Let’s face it.  If I ever decide to buy one of those emphyteutic leases, I won’t be doing anybody any good–except my solicitor, maybe–if I refer to it that way.

I’m not the only person who does this, of course, and sometimes the word you find is wonderful on many levels.

There’s the word stercoraceous, for instance.  It essentially means “full of shit,” but that isn’t what it sounds like.  What it sounds like is something along the lines of “copacetic,” a compliment, something good you’re saying about somebody.

You have no idea how much trouble that kept me out of in the days when I was endlessly fighting with my mother.

An awful lot of the words I become entranced with, however, have little or no use in my life. 

I just like the way they sound, and I like them better the more polysyllabic they are.

I like the word “polysyllabic.”

And because what I do most of the time on most days, these words I pick up tend to get integrated into my speech and writing before I manage to notice it, so that I end up getting into tangled webs of arguments on things like FB and Internet forums with people who inevitably just think I’m putting it on.

In this case, though, the accusations of putting it on aren’t what bother me.

What bothers me is that as soon as that starts, the discussion has been knocked off course for the remainder of the time it’s got left, and I end up never having made my point.

Even when people aren’t mad at me, we end up doing more word definitions than arguments about the use of the death penalty or whether pigs have wings.

Of course, as soon as I tell myself I have to stop it, one of those wonderful words comes along.

I give you oomphaloskepsis–a word that means “contemplating one’s navel as an aid to medidation,” but that works just as well, and often, as meaning contemplating one’s navel as an act of idiocy.

I sometimes wonder if there was ever a world out there, or part of a world, where groups of people used words like these as a matter of course.

I tend to doubt it.

I think these words exist because there are other people in the world who are as enamored of polysyllabism as I am, and they make them up.

I haven’t made one up myself yet, but inventing a word has always been one of my secret ambitions.

Maybe someday I’ll get around to it.