Reading the Oxford English Dictionary: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages

You cannot get any sort of tactile pleasure from rubbing the pages of a computer. (Maybe some people do get a tactile pleasure from rubbing their computers, but they are not people I have any interest in knowing anything about.)

Empleomania (n.) A manic compulsion to hold public office. I would suggest that anyone who, in this day and age, is stricken with the urge to hold public office is deserving of this diagnosis, and should immediately be banned for life from “serving” the public in any capacity that requires more responsibility than that of…

Deipnosophist (n.) A person who is learned in the art of dining. Although I prefer the definition found in Webster’s Third (“a person skilled in table talk”), the OED offers the bonus of another word, which most dictionaries do not have: deipnophobia (fear of dinner parties).

Compotation (n.) An episode of drinking or carousing together. Compotation is like the less successful younger brother of symposium. Both words originally meant nothing more than “a drinking party.” But where compotation has apparently never sought to better itself, symposium has gone on to get its act together and add…

Coenaculous (adj.) Supper-eating, or, as the OED phrases it, “Supper-loving.” Every once in a great while, a definition provided by the OED is startlingly conversational, as if someone at Oxford had declared they would have “casual-definition Friday,” and the result was that the editors all let their hair down and came up…

Cellarhood (n.) The state of being a cellar. Along with tableity (the condition of being a table) and paneity (the state of being bread), cellarhood is a wonderful example of the spectacular ways English has of describing things that no ever thinks it necessary to describe.

Cacotechny (n.) “Bad art; a hurtful or mischievous art.” (OED) Although both the etymology and the citations for this word would seem to suggest that the art referred to is of the mechanical rather than the cultural sort, I cannot resist the temptation to take this word literally, since, as any moviegoer, theater fan, or…

Bouffage (n.) An enjoyable or satisfying meal. Bouffage comes from an Old French word of the same spelling, and in the etymology we find that Randle Cotgrave defined it in his 1611 French-English dictionary as “cheeke-puffing meat.” Cheek-puffing just does not have the same currency as an indicator of satisfaction that it…

Bedinner (v.) To treat to dinner. So many other verbs that begin with this prefix appear to entail the act of throwing or projecting something unpleasant upon someone. For instance, bespawl is to splatter with saliva, bescumber is to splatter with dung, and bevomit . . . you can figure that one out on your own. It’s…

Beadledom (n.) The sense of self-importance and officiousness seen as characteristic of beadles, or minor officials. A beadle was a town crier, or one who made proclamations, a job that seems to have gone the way of the dodo. Stupid officiousness on the part of public officials, however, remains alive and well.