Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
It’s freaking reboantic, I tells ya
Jake’s reading Dante’s Inferno for school (and to digress before I’ve yet to ingress, why do English teachers love Inferno so much? The only thing I can recall about Dante’s Inferno: one of my English teacher’s husband’s ancestors appeared in the book, or at least someone with his name appeared in the book, probably for the sin of shagging tiresome old AP English teachers) and came across the word reboantic.
Before I enlighten you as to the meaning of reboantic, I’d like to say that I have no hatred for obscure words. Obscure words are fun. Obscure words were the only redeeming feature (features?) of Reginald Hill’s Dialogues of the Dead, a book I otherwise detested. Hey, I like knowing that a zyzzogeton is a large South American leaf hopper. And so does Ammon Shea, author of Reading the Oxford English Dictionary: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. Which sounds like a fun read, or at least a better read than the OED.
Reboantic: reverberant.
Know what pisses me off about reboantic? It has the same number of syllables as reverberant. Then why the hell didn’t the translator use reverberant? I do recognize that reboantic has its accent on the third syllable, reverberant on the second, so perhaps reverberant didn’t scan as well. But isn’t there something to be said about avoiding a word that sends its reader scurrying to the nearest internet dictionary, thus disrupting the reading experience?
Or did the translator really expect us to know reboantic, a word I’ve never seen before in my life?
As the fool says all the time in Christopher Moore’s Fool (a ripping good read): Fuckstockings.
Find that in your OED.
D.
You’re darned lucky it’s even in the OED! Perhaps you should adopt it to make sure it stays there: http://www.savethewords.org/
I love it!