From last week’s issue of the Times Literary Supplement, comes this amusing note on words and wordiness: “Each reissue of a dictionary is accompanied by a press release intended to alert journalists to new words and phrases. While some are likely to stick around . . . most will whither unlamented: Aerobicize, celbutante, retronym, e-Baying.”

“More interesting,” writes TLS, are “words that never made it. Johnson’s Dictionary, for example, offered effumability, the capacity to be converted into vapour, an expression which would come in handy in literary criticism—”Mr. X’s poetry is rich in effumability, if nothing else . . .”

One can only imagine the state of modern poetry, had the critical force of effumability been unleashed at the dawn of the Romantic age. A few more words, deserving resurrection or rehabilitation, are as follows: “honey-fuggle: to obtain by deception; bloviate: to talk pompously; hugsome: someone who can be hugged; immoment: unimportant; baggegery: the rabble; jolliment: merriment; malt-worm: a drunkard.”

But I’ll stop there, lest I weasel my way into the bloviating coterie of philologians.