![]() Also Grand Panjandrum, Great Panjandrum.’ The word then grew to have a secondary meaning: ‘Ceremonial fuss or formality rigmarole, affair.’ This meaning is now rare, although it gives a sense of how widespread the term may once have been. Here’s how the Oxford English Dictionary defines it: ‘(A mock title for) a mysterious (frequently imaginary) personage of great power or authority a pompous or pretentious official a self-important person in authority. Before Lewis Carroll’s coinages ‘chortle’ and ‘galumph’ (both invented for his poem ‘Jabberwocky’) entered more mainstream usage, ‘panjandrum’ was spreading from the realms of nonsense writing and becoming a household word. ‘Panjandrum’, then, became a word in its own right. Whether Macklin triumphed has not, it appears, been recorded. ![]() Foote would attend Macklin’s lectures and heckle, and it was on one such occasion that he put his friend’s boast to the test that he could memorise and recite a piece of writing having only heard it spoken once. Later in their careers, in the 1750s, Macklin opened a school of oratory where he taught young men how to speak properly (I picture it as being much like that scene from Blackadder the Third, pictured right). ![]() Foote was the younger man by thirty years, and Macklin took the young British actor and playwright under his wing. What inspired Foote to write it? The Oxford English Dictionary notes of the word ‘panjandrum’: ‘The word is supposed to have been coined in 1754 or 1755 as part of a farrago of nonsense composed by Samuel Foote (1720–77), actor and dramatist, to test the memory of his fellow actor Charles Macklin, who had asserted that he could repeat anything after hearing it once.’ Macklin, an Irish actor, lived a remarkably long life – he died at the ripe old age of 106, in 1797 – and was a well-known figure on the stage at the famed Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Possibly the best word for it, and it's meant approvingly, is ' farrago.Those ‘Joblillies’ seem to be the ancestors of Lear’s Jumblies, and Picninnies is dangerously close to (and was probably inspired by) a derogatory racial term in common use at the time. Helium-sniffing Simeon Troll goes for broke in the mad world of PotyaĪt the end of a long week of sexism and counter-sexism, the white heat of the Richard Keys and Andy Gray farrago seemed to fade as quickly as it blew up.Īndy Gray and Richard Keys convicted on sound evidence | Barney Ronay Possibly the best word for it, and it's meant approvingly, is ' farrago.'ĭavid Tereshchuk: Mixed-Media Extravaganza - and a Global MessageĪs hardly needs repeating here, Mint's part in the corruption farrago rested entirely on a homonym-inspired error that led him to offer the German FA a side of pork and two kilograms of liver sausage for Berti Vogts. Posner reviews them all in turn, in a hectic flurry of piled-up fact-bites, speculative calcula-tions, passing quarrels, and offhand policy dicta ” an orderless mixture of assertion, guess, remark, and opinion for which the term " farrago" would seem to have been invented. The play has been described as a farrago of undercooked ideas and clashing styles by some critics, lauded as a brilliantly unorthodox play of daring imaginative scope by others.īeverly Darmour, Diane Skinner introduced the word " farrago," meaning mixture or medley. Not a word of all this, which common minds called farrago, but which had its truth to me, did I utter to Laura. The Volokh Conspiracy » Genetic Evidence Shows Common Origins of Jews Why the UN acquiesces in this obscene farrago is an exercise best left to the student. ![]()
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