A gift of words - proposal for 2 new English words - sesquilingual and capicue - column

National Review, Dec 22, 1989 by Peter Lubin

YEARS AGO I dreamed of becoming immortal. So I went to Walton Crescent in Oxford, head arters of the Oxford English Dictionary, to inquire how I might ensure that my coinages would find their way into future editions of the Bible of Words. I was crestfallen to discover that each word would have to appear in at least five publications, in works by various authors. My youthful dreams were dashed.

But I recovered, and would like to share two words I recently invented.

The first came to me as I read an article on the seeming inability of American students to learn foreign languages. American students of French rarely master the "intricacies of the parley-voo," the ones who study Italian may be at ease with the cameriere in a cafe but are usually at sea with Dante in the classroom, and the students who major in Russian may actually be able to read Izvestia -and even find it, as do its Soviet readers, "absorbent"-but are they likely to become privy to Pushkin's poetic technique? Nyet. Thirty words memorized for each class, the language labs, the videocassettes, and all the trips abroad are not substitutes for constant immersion in the language and culture of a foreign land. Unlike the Europeans, we cannot just hop over the border to polish our Polish, or hone our Hungarian.

So, Americans seldom become bilingual. Yet many can no longer be considered simply monolingual. What then shall we call those who have more than just a smattering of another language? I know. I ought to; I made up the word. Such students are sesquilingual, the noun being sesquilinguist"one who knows one and a half languages." No longer need one say sheepishly, "I know a little French." One can now proclaim, "I'm sesquilingual." It will be a useful word on resumes, as 1992 approaches. Although the Latin root ("Sesqui") occurs in a number of chemical and musical terms (sesquisalt, sesquitertia), most of us have encountered it in only two words: sesquipedalian (literally, "one and a half feet"), a pejorative commonly used to describe polysyllabic words that we don't understand and the people who use them ("William F. Buckley, the sesquipedalian writer . . ."); and sesquicentennial, the 150th anniversary of a given event. What grand thing happened in 1839?

A second new word came to me when a friend in Cambridge, England, gave me his new telephone number: 51015. It occurred to me that we do not possess a word for the numerical equivalent of a palindrome, those words, phrases, and even whole sentences that are the same read backward as forward. Then, while leafing through a Spanish dictionary, I came across the word "capiclia," formed from the Latin caput, head, and the Spanish cola, tail, which is, indeed, a word meanin"a number that reads the same in either direction." Eureka! I have Americanized the word, shaving off its last syllable, and proudly present capicue, to be pronounced: kap-ee-kew.

Sesquilinguist and capicue, today making their first appearances in print, are yours to use to your mind's content. Happy holidays! And I'll be grateful if you do-just in case I decide to make another assault on Walton Crescent. Fair's fair, and if you should create a new word, and would like it to be used here, I will try to oblige. Perhaps then we can both enter, clapping and singing, the glorious kingdom of the OED.