795-1: Feedback, Notes and Comments

Tit for tat Numerous readers echoed Roger Downham’s comment: “There was I, happily assuming that ‘tit for tat’ was a corruption of ‘this for that’, when you came along and complicated it all!”

Abecedarian Michael Lean added another layer of complexity to this word’s senses, “There’s also the abecedarian insult, which requires vocabularian talent: ‘You alopecian, bombastic, curmudgeonly, dilatory, egregious, fawning, gluttonous...’. You get the idea. I can’t remember where it cropped up now.” He may be thinking of this modern example:

Abecedarian insult “Sir, you are an apogenous, bovaristic, coprolalial, dasypygal, excerebrose, facinorous, gnathonic, hircine, ithyphallic, jumentous, kyphotic, labrose, mephitic, napiform, oligophrenial, papuliferous, quisquilian, rebarbative, saponaceous, thersitical, unguinous, ventripotent, wlatsome, xylocephalous, yirning zoophyte.”
[The Superior Person’s Book of Words, by Peter Bowler, 1985. He appends an explanation but I leave the gloss as an exercise for the reader.]

Teresa Folkes commented, “Aleric Watts, who I had never heard of otherwise, wrote a poem that I learned in childhood, which began ‘An Austrian army, awfully arrayed’ and so on to the end of the alphabet. Not good verse, but very appealing to a child.” Aleric Watts, whose middle name was “Attila”, as in the Hun, is usually credited with the poem but there’s some doubt over authorship. The verses were published in the Literary Gazette of London on 23 December 1820 to illustrate alliteration rather than abecedarianism, though they are abecedaric as well. To give you the whole thing might induce alphabetical surfeit, but this is how it begins and ends:

An Austrian army, awfully arrayed,

Boldly by battery besieged Belgrade.

Cossack commanders cannonading come,

Dealing destruction’s devastating doom.

...

Why wish we warfare? Wherefore welcome were

Xerxes, Ximenes, Xanthus, Xavier?

Yield, yield, ye youths! ye yeomen, yield your yell!

Zeus’, Zarpater’s, Zoroaster’s zeal.