Wednesday, December the 31th, 2008

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Fuge

Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti has a marvellous post on words ending in –fuge. He notes Thomas Hardy's coinage of dolorifuge in Tess Of The D'Urbervilles –

“The children … had made use of this idea as a species of dolorifuge after the death of the horse.”

– and cites a contemporary reviewer of Hardy complaining about his “outlandish words” –

“Think how absolutely out of colour in Arcadia are such words as ‘dolorifuge’, ‘photosphere’, ‘heliolatries', ‘arborescence’, ‘concatenation’, ‘noctambulist’—where, indeed, are such in colour?—and Mr. Hardy further uses that horrid verb ‘ecstatisize’.”

There are many more –fuge words to chew over, and I may well make use of some of them in the coming year.