This is completely vicarious. I decided to rewrite a previous posting to add in more limericks so that it had a limerick for every entry. The previous posting had a mere five limericks. It has thus been upgraded. Nothing ties together this list of words except for the fact that each definition is accompanied by at least one limerick, some of them borrowed from elsewhere. Here are your ten obscure words:

1. Longiloquence. I’m a strong believer in the idea that more people would use dictionaries if all the definitions were written as limericks. They would certainly remember the words a lot better. However there are a number of problems with the idea:

• Writing definitions is a lot easier than writing limericks
• Some words just don’t scan well, especially multisyllabic ones
• A good number of the definitions would surely suffer from longiloquence.

Apropos of which:

In a limerick let me condense
The meaning of longiloquence;
It’s about using herds
Of nouns, pronouns and verbs
When just one word or two would make sense.

Longiloquence means using far too many words. This is something that distinguished, for example, the poet who came from Raton from the poet who came from Peru, as demonstrated by the following two limericks:

A poet who came from Raton
Wrote a poem that went on and on
For ages and ages
‘Cross pages and pages
Completing on page 91

Whereas…

There once was a man from Peru
Whose limericks stopped at line two.
[Origin - http://www.alphadictionary.com/fun/limericks.html]

2. Immaterialism. It’s not impossible to work out the meaning of this word and anyone steeped in philosophy will probably know it. Despite the fact that it sounds like a doctrine based on the observation “Pardon me, but you’ll clearly mistaken me for someone who gives a s***”, or more famously “Quite frankly, Scarlet, I don’t give a damn!”, it is not.

Immaterialism is the theory that material substance does not exist at all and the universe is created entirely by minds and the ideas that inhabit them. Immaterialism was propounded by Bishop Berkeley in the 18th century and summarized in his motto “esse est percipi” (To be is to be perceived).
Lampooning this philosophical speculation, Monsignor Ronald Knox wrote the following limerick:

There once was a man who said “God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there’s no one about in the quad.”

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