Last Letter Game

[The_Wizard]

Tetrapyloctomy
noun.
The act of splitting a hair four ways.

Don’t be a mere two-way hair-splitter; grasp your pedantry firmly in both hands and split your hair crosswise into four. This word has found a secure if niche existence in the lexicons of academics with a sense of humour since it was invented by Umberto Eco in his novel Foucault’s Pendulum, published in English in 1989. In a mocking attempt to reform higher education, one character proposes a School of Comparative Irrelevance, whose aim would be to turn out scholars capable of endlessly increasing the number of unnecessary topics. In it would be a Department of Tetrapyloctomy, whose function would be to inculcate a sense of irrelevance in its students. Another department would study useless techniques, such as Assyrio-Babylonian philately and Aztec Equitation. The word combines tetra, four, with pilus, hair (as in depilatory), and the ending -tomy, a cutting. As the component parts come respectively from Greek, Latin and Greek it’s a miscegenated linguistic sandwich that no self-respecting scholar would invent, which is no doubt why Umberto Eco found it to be appropriate.
 

[The_Wizard]

Rhinotillexomania
noun
Habitual or obsessive nose-picking.

This word had its fifteen minutes of fame at the IgNobel awards at Harvard University in October 2001. These annual ceremonies recognise research that, in the words of the organisers, “cannot or should not be reproduced”. The award for Public Heath went to an article, A Preliminary Survey of Rhinotillexomania in an Adolescent Sample, which was published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry back in April. The judges described this as a “probing medical discovery that nose-picking is a common activity among adolescents”.

Rhinotillexomania looks like an example of word invention for its own sake, but it has appeared a few times in scientific publications. I haven’t been able to trace it back very far; an early example commonly referred to is a postal survey carried out by two Wisconsin researchers in 1994; this was written up in 1995, also in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, which seems to have a near corner on the term.

The word seems to have been invented in imitation of trichotillomania, an older term for a compulsive desire to pull out one’s hair. This comes, in part, from Greek tillesthai, to pull out. The new word should have been rhinotillomania (from the classical Greek rhis, rhin–, meaning nose), but its authors, unversed in classical Greek, added an unnecessary –exo– (from Greek exo, outside).  

[The_Wizard]

Whilom
An adjective meaning former.

This adjective is one of three — the others being erstwhile and quondam — all with the same meaning. They are equally strange and un-English in appearance. But whilom is probably the weirdest of the set, and also the least used, to the extent that I had trouble finding a contemporary example. Here’s an older one, from J M Barrie’s book The Little White Bird of 1903: “Whom did I see but the whilom nursery governess sitting on a chair in one of these gardens”, meaning that the lady had once been a governess, but was one no longer. The word dates to Old English, at a time when the language was heavily inflected — adjectives, nouns, and verbs taking different endings depending on the job they were doing. Whilom — then spelt hwilom — was the dative plural of hwil, the same word as our modern while. As English progressively lost its inflections, the word became a fossil, with its ending stuck to it permanently; at the same time the meaning shifted to mean something of a former time, a change that was complete by the fifteenth century.