Sunday 23 August 2020

Unasinity

 It is not in any dictionary, but it is surely a logical derivation from "unasinous" which is in the OED (but not the Shorter Oxford or Chambers'). Susie Dent explains the latter in an article in yesterday's i ("What a week for the language of failure").

Synonyms for "fool" abound in the dictionary, including the "saddle-goose" and "buffard" from the 1400s, "little Witham" from the 1500s (apparently after a village whose inhabitants were known for their stupidity*), and "middicock", "noddypeak" and "dizzard" from the 1600s. All of them led up to today's "nincompoops", "wallies", "sapheads", "chumps" and "plonkers".

If, hypothetically speaking, all those fools came together and acted in extreme combined idiocy, they could be described as "unasinous", a word with only a single quotation in the OED, from 1656, but which is surely due a comeback. A riff on "unanimous", it means "united in stupidity", and comes from the Latin unus, "one", and asinus, "ass". Worth bearing in mind when the buffards begin to bray.

* An early Essex girl reference?


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