Sesquipedalian
Maybe Orwell was right
So much of our dictionary would make fine kindling on a cold winter’s day
An inferno fed with filler words fit for high school spelling bees
Decisive scrabble victories
Moderately secure email passwords
And little else
Take “sesquipedalian”
A word that has only stuck with me because I will never use it
If it were a long-extinct genus of reptile like you’d think
I would probably have more cause
I like to imagine an old late-night television sketch
A distinguished professor standing at a lectern
Droning on about “the epistemology of floccinaucinihilipilification” or some nonsense
And me thrusting my hand and nose and eyebrows in the air to say
“Sir, there’s no need to be quite so sesquipedalian”
Checkmate
Canned laughter echoes at our collective waste of precious time and oxygen
Truly I find the invention of a word so oxymoronic
So sesquipedalian
To be more Hamlet than Twelfth Night
Tragic, how often our little words mean so little
Damned as we’ve been since Babel to spend lifetimes circumlocuting
Orbiting a number of bright, burning truths
That must have dipped below the horizon one day
And left the human race blind to tread an infinite sea of ink
Waiting in vain for our eyes to adjust to the impossible
Fighting to cry out “you matter” or
“this matters” or
“that’s beautiful”
In the space of far too many heartbeats.
I’ve since been told that this entire poem is sesquipedalian
My sincerest apologies
The last thing I meant to leave behind is this:
A page full of wasted syllables
All to say something so simple it could have rhymed.
What the Poet Says
I fail to remember when exactly I first came across the word 'sesquipedalian', but at this point it has been written on a sticky note on my laptop along with a number of other interesting words and their definitions for months. While I occasionally see if I can drop a few of them into normal conversations, I felt that particular word, while humorous in a pretentious way, was almost utterly useless. There are so many critical ideas we do not have the necessary language to express, and here is a word that can only serve to exacerbate the linguistic issue it identifies. This poem is a response to that — and, of course, an excuse to finally use 'sesquipedalian.'
Roni Kane (she/her) is from Detroit, Michigan currently based in Edinburgh, Scotland where she works in international human rights. She aims to explore themes of temporality, identity, nature and collective culture through her poetry.
Instagram: @ronikane_