Great Big Beautiful List of Useless Words, Vol. 2
Great Big Beautiful List of Useless Words, Vol. 2
Welcome to Off the Clock — where we step away from the urgent and indulge the enduring.
Every other Saturday, I send a private note to subscribers exploring the curious corners of language, history, and the words we think we know—but don’t.
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1922
Last summer, we waded together into the shallow end of English’s great forgotten lexicon1 — a place where scholars once labored over words that the rest of the world had quietly decided it could live without. The response was, to use a word from that list, scripturiently enthusiastic.
Now we’re back with a second volume of beautiful, obscure, and largely pointless words. The list itself isn’t pointless — consider it like your attic, holding both treasures and puzzlements, unseen for years. If jentacular and deipnosophist became household words in your home after Vol. 1, you are more than ready for these. If not — the door remains open, and the list is linked below.
What strikes me, reviewing the full list, is how much human behavior had once earned itself a word. The person who pretends to refuse what they want, the enthusiast who opines past their knowledge, the lover who only pretends to love, the writer hiding behind anonymity while contributing little.
These are not historical curiosities. They are live conditions, updated daily, simply awaiting the right vocabulary.
Here, then, is the second installment2 of words you will probably never use — but will be genuinely glad to know.
Roorback
Definition: a defamatory falsehood published for political effect
What makes roorback special is that it is a lie built on a lie, twice removed from reality. The word comes from the invented “Baron von Roorback,” a fictional European nobleman conjured in 1844 to smear presidential candidate James K. Polk with an accusation that Polk had branded the initials of his ownership onto dozens of enslaved people.
The accusation was false. The Baron was fictional. And yet the word roorback survived — a monument to the durability of political bad faith. The irony is that the broader accusation was true: Polk did own enslaved people, a fact that somehow got lost in the outrage over the forgery.
Now, 180 years later, the phenomenon the word describes is no longer obscure. Only the word itself is.
Ultracrepidarian
Definition: giving opinions on matters beyond one’s knowledge
This one traces to Apelles, the most celebrated painter of ancient Greece — so respected that Alexander the Great reportedly allowed only him to paint his likeness. According to Pliny the Elder, when a shoemaker once dared to critique Apelles’ rendering of a sandal strap, Apelles corrected the flaw. When the emboldened cobbler moved on to criticizing the figure’s leg, Apelles cut him off: ne sutor ultra crepidam — “let the shoemaker not go beyond the sole.”
From that exchange, we get ultracrepidarian: one who opines about things they know nothing about. The concept predates the Roman Republic. The word arrived in English only in the nineteenth century.3 The behavior has never required either a name or an era to flourish.
Anecdotage
Definition: garrulous old age
Here is a portmanteau of genuine elegance: anecdote blended with dotage (that decline of mental acuity that visits the elderly) to produce a word for the condition of being old and unstoppably full of stories.
The word captures something real about the relationship between memory and age. As the future compresses, the past expands. The long-term storage is often intact; what changes is the editorial instinct about which stories to tell and when to stop telling them.
Every family has someone in anecdotage. They are often the most interesting person at the table. They are also, occasionally, the reason the table runs two hours long.
Jackassery
Definition: a piece of stupidity or folly
There is a dignity to precision. When the St. Charles Republican Intelligencer of Iowa used this word in 1857 to describe a political maneuver it found contemptible, it was doing what good prose always does: reaching for the exact word rather than the approximate one.
The construction follows the pattern of foolery, knavery, trickery — the suffix -ery denoting a condition or collective practice. It is a word that sounds exactly like what it means, which is the highest compliment you can pay to a word.
Accismus
Definition: the pretended refusal of something one keenly desires
Ancient rhetoric had a name for every trick in the book — because ancient rhetoric wrote the book. Accismus is the technical term for the feigned rejection: the politician who “reluctantly” accepts a nomination, the actor who “resists” the standing ovation, the child who says “no thank you” to a second cookie while staring at the cookie.
The Greeks classified it as a figure of speech. The moderns call it something less flattering. Either way, it has been in continuous operation since at least the age of Pericles, which suggests either that the stratagem works or that humanity has never quite located the off switch.
🔒 This is where the paywall falls — and where things get considerably stranger.
The words above are merely neglected. The ones below are a different category entirely: words for smells that recall undercooked meat, words excited beginnings and insignificant writers, and at least one word Shakespeare himself deployed and then the rest of civilization quietly abandoned. If your curiosity is intact after five perfectly good words, you may be exactly the kind of reader who needs the next twelve.
Subscribe to Off the Clock to read on — and to receive every future installment of words the world forgot but probably shouldn’t have.
