Honorificabilitudinitatibus
Encyclopedia
Dative case
The dative case is a grammatical case generally used to indicate the noun to whom something is given, as in "George gave Jamie a drink"....
and ablative
Ablative case
In linguistics, ablative case is a name given to cases in various languages whose common characteristic is that they mark motion away from something, though the details in each language may differ...
plural of the mediæval Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
word honorificabilitudinitas, which can be translated as "the state of being able to achieve honours". It is mentioned by the character Costard
Costard
Costard is a comic figure in the play Love's Labour's Lost by William Shakespeare. A country bumpkin, he is arrested in the first scene for flouting the king's proclamation that all men of the court avoid the company of women for a year. While in custody, the men of the court use him to further...
in Act V, Scene I of William Shakespeare's
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
Love's Labour's Lost
Love's Labour's Lost
Love's Labour's Lost is one of William Shakespeare's early comedies, believed to have been written in the mid-1590s, and first published in 1598.-Title:...
. As it appears only once in Shakespeare's works, it is a hapax legomenon
Hapax legomenon
A hapax legomenon is a word which occurs only once within a context, either in the written record of an entire language, in the works of an author, or just in a single text. The term is sometimes used incorrectly to describe a word that occurs in just one of an author's works, even though it...
in the Shakespeare canon. It is also the longest word in the English language featuring alternating consonants and vowels.
Use in Love's Labour's Lost
The word is spoken by the comic rustic CostardCostard
Costard is a comic figure in the play Love's Labour's Lost by William Shakespeare. A country bumpkin, he is arrested in the first scene for flouting the king's proclamation that all men of the court avoid the company of women for a year. While in custody, the men of the court use him to further...
in Act V, Scene 1 of the play. It is used after an absurdly pretentious dialogue between the pedantic schoolmaster Holofernes and his friend Sir Nathaniel. The two pedants converse in a mixture of Latin and florid English. When Moth, a witty young servant, enters, Costard says of the pedants,
"O, they have lived long on the alms-basket of words. I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word; for thou art not long by the head as honorificabilitudinitatibus: thou art easier swallowed than a flap-dragon."Flap-dragon was a game which involved trying to eat hot raisins from a bowl of burning brandy.
Use in Baconism
The word has been used by adherents of the Baconian theoryBaconian theory
The Baconian theory of Shakespearean authorship holds that Sir Francis Bacon, lawyer, philosopher, essayist and scientist, wrote the plays conventionally attributed to William Shakespeare, and that the historical Shakespeare was merely a front to shield the identity of Bacon, who could not take...
—who believe Shakespeare's plays were written in steganographic cypher by Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Albans, KC was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, lawyer, jurist, author and pioneer of the scientific method. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England...
. Edwin Durning-Lawrence
Edwin Durning-Lawrence
Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence, 1st Baronet was a British lawyer and Member of Parliament.He is best known for his advocacy of the Baconian theory of Shakespeare authorship, which asserts that Francis Bacon was the author of Shakespeare's plays. He published a number of books on the subject and...
argued that it was an anagram
Anagram
An anagram is a type of word play, the result of rearranging the letters of a word or phrase to produce a new word or phrase, using all the original letters exactly once; e.g., orchestra = carthorse, A decimal point = I'm a dot in place, Tom Marvolo Riddle = I am Lord Voldemort. Someone who...
for hi ludi, F. Baconis nati, tuiti orbi, Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
for "these plays, F. Bacon's offspring, are preserved for the world". The anagram assumes that Bacon would have Latinized his name as "Baco" (the genitive case of which is "Baconis") rather than as "Baconus" (the genitive of which would be "Baconi"). Against Durning-Lawrence, some have claimed that in composing such an anagram Bacon would have Latinized his name as "Baconus", with genitive "Baconi". The genitive of his name is, however, given as "Baconis" in some seventeenth-century works.
John Sladek
John Sladek
John Thomas Sladek was an American science fiction author, known for his satirical and surreal novels.- Life and work :...
noted in the 1970s that the word could also be anagrammatized as I, B. Ionsonii, uurit [writ] a lift'd batch, thus "proving" that Shakespeare's works were written by Ben Jonson
Ben Jonson
Benjamin Jonson was an English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. A contemporary of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satirical plays, particularly Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, which are considered his best, and his lyric poems...
. (The two "u"s, rendered as "v"s in the original literation, are put together to form - literally - "a double u" (w), as was common practice in Shakespeare's day.) Since it involves an odd mixture of Latin and English, which Bacon would have been unlikely to use, Sladek's parody of Durning-Lawrence's argument is not universally conceded to discredit the latter.
Other uses
The word, however, was used long before Shakespeare used it in Love's Labour's Lost. Honorificabilitudo appears in a Latin charter of 1187, and occurs as honorificabilitudinitas in 1300. DanteDante Alighieri
Durante degli Alighieri, mononymously referred to as Dante , was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. He is best known for the monumental epic poem La commedia, later named La divina commedia ...
cites honorificabilitudinitate as a typical example of a long word in De Vulgari Eloquentia
De vulgari eloquentia
De vulgari eloquentia is the title of an essay by Dante Alighieri, written in Latin and initially meant to consist of four books, but abandoned in the middle of the second. It was probably composed shortly after Dante went into exile; internal evidence points to a date between 1302 and 1305...
II. vii. It also occurs in the works of Rabelais and in The Complaynt of Scotland
The Complaynt of Scotland
The Complaynt of Scotland is a book printed in 1549 and is an important work of the Scots language.The book is a continuation of the war of words between Scotland and England in the sixteenth century...
(1549). The year after the publication of Love's Labours Lost it is used by Thomas Nashe
Thomas Nashe
Thomas Nashe was an English Elizabethan pamphleteer, playwright, poet and satirist. He was the son of the minister William Nashe and his wife Margaret .-Early life:...
in his 1599 pamphlet Nashe’s Lenten Stuff: "Physicians deafen our ears with the Honorificabilitudinitatibus of their heavenly Panacaea, their sovereign Guiacum", referring to the exotic medicinal plant Guaiacum
Guaiacum
Guaiacum, sometimes spelled Guajacum, is a genus of flowering plants in the caltrop family Zygophyllaceae. It contains five species of slow-growing shrubs and trees, reaching a height of approximately but are usually less than half of that...
, the name of which was also "exotic", being the first Native American word imported into the English language. The word also appears in Marston's Dutch Courtezan (1605)
James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
also used this word in his mammoth novel Ulysses
Ulysses (novel)
Ulysses is a novel by the Irish author James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, in Paris. One of the most important works of Modernist literature,...
, during the Scylla and Charybdis
Scylla and Charybdis
Being between Scylla and Charybdis is an idiom deriving from Greek mythology. Several other idioms, such as "on the horns of a dilemma", "between the devil and the deep blue sea", and "between a rock and a hard place" express the same meaning of "having to choose between two evils".-The myth and...
episode when Stephen Dedalus
Stephen Dedalus
Stephen Dedalus is James Joyce's literary alter ego, appearing as the protagonist and antihero of his first, semi-autobiographical novel of artistic existence A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and an important character in Joyce's Ulysses...
articulates his interpretation of Hamlet
Hamlet
The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or more simply Hamlet, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1599 and 1601...
.
In 1993 U.S. News and World Report used the word in its original meaning with reference to a debate about new words being used in the game of Scrabble
Scrabble
Scrabble is a word game in which two to four players score points by forming words from individual lettered tiles on a game board marked with a 15-by-15 grid. The words are formed across and down in crossword fashion and must appear in a standard dictionary. Official reference works provide a list...
; "Honorificabilitudinity and the requirements of Scrabble fans dictated that the New Shorter [Oxford English Dictionary]'s makers be open-minded enough to include dweeb (a boringly conventional person), droob (an unprepossessing or contemptible person, esp. a man) and droog (a member of a gang: a young ruffian)."