Back in 1994 I photocopied a couple of pages from John B. Bremner’s Words on Words to have a copy of the entry BUCKLEYISM, which begins:
A reviewer of a book by William F. Buckley, Jr., a collection of his newspaper columns, found himself marking many words he didn’t understand or wasn’t sure of. He wove some Buckleyisms into this sentence and led his review with it:
“For anfractuous tuquoqueism and immanentization of the eschaton without the chiliastic afflatus of solipsistic brachycephalics, one must etiologically etiolate the fustian rodomontade of phlogistonic energumens and their psychotropic epigoni whose sylleptic ignoratio elenchi and apodictic sciolism transmogrify the apopemptic meiosis and anaphoric interstices of the sibylline incunabula of autarkic ultramontanism, lest by jacobinical malversation the incondite tatterdemalions detumesce the osmotically jejune hagiolaters of soritically otiose taxonomists despite the inchoate enthymeme of paradigmatic animadversion and the meritocratic dirigisme of some anapaestic eponym.”
Bremmer says, “To find out how many of the 89 words in the lead paragraph could be understood by educated readers without being driven to a dictionary,” he asked twenty journalism professors: “The highest score was 60, recorded by an antediluvian lexicographer. The lowest was 35…” I myself beat out the antediluvian lexicographer with a score of 70, though I may have given myself the benefit of the doubt on some words I had only a general sense of. Anyway, I showed this to a coworker who challenged me to paraphrase it; my effort is below the cut.
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