, Columnist
Blackadder Would Like a Word About the Last Five Years
It starts with C, and it’s not ‘contrafibularities.’
Is ‘coronavirus’ in that anaspectic word book?
Source: Blackadder the Third/Radio Times/Getty
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There’s a scene in the great British sitcom Blackadder when Dr. Samuel Johnson proudly arrives with his new dictionary, and proclaims that it includes every single word in the English language. Blackadder, keen to take him down a peg, offers “my most enthusiastic contrafibularities.” As Johnson gasps with annoyance at a word he’s missed, Blackadder says that he is “anaspeptic, frasmotic, and compunctuous” to have caused such pericombobulations. Then he leaves, saying he’ll return “interfrastically.”