Adoxography, a Rare Publishing Word
Hello,
This week’s word is another writing term, in honour of the first Ireland Reads day (if you haven’t pledged to read yet, click here). Adoxography is a word I gathered somewhere online, possibly from one of those beautiful word pins on pinterest which look pretty but give no information. I tucked it away for later exploration and today is the day.
Adoxography is “elegant or refined writing which addresses a trivial or base subject”. That definition is from Wikipedia, by the way, which wouldn’t be my favourite source for such things and rather worryingly adoxography is not present in the Merriam Webster or the Oxford English Dictionary.
Wikipedia also adds that the word was coined in the 1800s. Note that date, we’ll be coming back to it.
The Fine Dictionary says “Elizabethan schoolboys were taught adoxography, the art of eruditely praising worthless things” and “adoxography is particularly useful to lawyers”. Those quote marks are theirs and are not attributed to anybody. Also, how can adoxography be coined in the 1800s if schoolboys in the 1500s were already doing it?
The ever-reliable Etymology Online doesn’t list adoxography (another red flag) but I did find one etymology listing online, at wiktionary.org and it goes like this – adoxography is compounded from New Latin adoxus (absurd, paradoxical) and graphy from the ancient Greek graphia (writing). I’m the first to admit that I’m not a professional linguistics researcher but I’ve been exploring words for more than a decade now and it is rare to find one formed like that (New Latin and Ancient Greek didn’t exist at the same time, did they?) and any link to schoolboys can be a hint that bored schoolboys decided to invent a word using their rudimentary classics knowledge, for a laugh. The main references for this one (and I’m happy to be corrected, comment below if you know of a mainstream reference) are in crowd-sourced online venues which can be exploited and on word blogs whose authors are as confused as Wordfoolery.
Verdict? I think this isn’t a real word. I do, however, like the idea of fancy writing on a trivial topic (“Ode to a Broken Matchstick”, perhaps?). We may need to help adoxography become real, what do you think?
Until next time happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,
Grace (@Wordfoolery)
p.s. don’t forget to #SqueezeInARead this month and on the 25th. Any excuse to dive into a good book! I’ve just finished “Hamnet” by Maggie Farrell and have moved onto “Manx Tales” by S. Morrison. What are you reading this month? If you’re a Goodreads member feel free to friend/follow me there. I try to follow back and I review everything I read.
