The Most Ballin’ Words in Literature

1. "Pecksniffiana"Used by: Wallace Stevens & Charles Dickens
In October 1919 Wallace Stevens issued a 14-poem collection in Poetry magazine with the ostensibly bizarre title of Pecksniffiana.

Dickensians will recognize "Pecksniff" as being the second name of one of Dickens's most rawly hypocritical villains, Seth Pecksniff from Martin Chuzzlewit. Claiming to be a teacher of architecture, Pecksniff pockets his students' fees and steals their work, which he sells as his own. He's a flat bully, and the recipient of some of Dickens's most brutal, swinging-for-the-rafters sarcasm. So why on earth name a collection of poems after him?

Well, it's a brilliant name, for a start. Dickens, perhaps over and above any other anglophone writer, had a superb knack for names. They weren't straightforward representations of their owners, or ironical commentaries on their personalities, or even realistic. They just sounded awesome; powerful and sonorous even today, and worthy targets for Dickens's satirical onslaught. Pecksniff, Gradgrind, Fagin. Stevens, for his part, pimps the name out to "Peckniffiana", the morphology suggesting that it's now a place, or a collection of things relating to Pecksniff. The poems actually seem to present a series of different personae, as if using Pecksniff's overriding characteristic of hypocrisy and modulating it through lyrical expression. Stevens joins up the Dickensian hypocrisy with his own calling as a poet in "The Good Burgher": a poem which seems to delight in using baller words for their own sake.

It is with a strange malice
That I distort the world.

Ah! that ill humors
Should mask as white girls.
And ah! that Scaramouche
Should have a black barouche.

The sorry verities!
Yet in excess, continual,
There is cure of sorrow.

Permit that if as ghost I come
Among the people burning in me still,
I come as belle design
Of foppish line.

And I, then, tortured for old speech—
A white of wildly woven rings;
I, weeping in a calcined heart—
My hands such sharp, imagined things.

The mischievous rhyme of "Scaramouche" (a stock clown character in Italian comedies) and "barouche" (a style of horse-drawn carriage) and lightish tone mask a poem that ponders quite intensely the point of making art. "It is with strange malice / that I distort the world" seems to suggest that artistic endeavour is fundamentally hypocritical, fundamentally Pecksniffian. But not without good applications: "There is cure of sorrow." There is an anti-analytical undercurrent-- that we can enjoy the work of art but never understand it fully (this poem is, of course, but one failed attempt to do so), and the poem is a brilliant example of a writer enjoying language rather than trying to systematize it.

2."Multitudinous" and "Incarnadine"Used by: William Shakespeare
Contrary to popular opinion, this is the memest line in Shakespeare. Maybe they don't look like massively ballin' words; Shakespeare makes them so.

Macbeth, fresh from murdering his king so that he might usurp the throne, is suddenly put right on edge-- something as trivial as knocking at the gate makes him launch into this famous speech:

Whence is that knocking?
How is't with me, when every noise appalls me?
What hands are here? Hah! They pluck out mine eyes.
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

What makes these words ballin'? Shakespeare's preternatural inwardness with the texture of the English language. Nearly all of our vocabulary comes from two sources: the Anglo-Saxon language, and Latin (A pretty reliable rule of thumb: if a word has one syllable, it's probably Anglo-Saxon. Three or more, it probably comes from Latin) Most of our Latinate words come via Old French, after the Normans conquered England in 1066 and French became the language of the ruling classes. During the Renaissance, though, Latin took on a new prestige and was taught heavily in schools and universities, leading to writers coining new words straight from Latin, without the diluting effects of Old French and 500 years of integration. Shakespeare masterfully contrasts the multisyllabic, flashy words of "multitudinous" and "incarnadine" (which means "pink", "carn-" is the Latin root for flesh, from which "flesh color" is derived) with the powerful, blunt Anglo-Saxon colors: "green one red". Shakespeare: poet, dramatist, baller.

3. PolyphiloprogenitiveUsed by: T. S. Eliot
Readers familiar with "Prufrock", The Waste Land, and Four Quartets will be tuned in to the way Eliot is able to reach down to what Hugh Kenner called "the tentacular roots of language", the way Eliot's poetry is able to interrogate the etymological history of important words and question our ability to communicate with them. Less read is the volume he issued in 1920, five years after "Prufrock" and two years before The Waste Land. The same poems were published in two different arrangements: the version printed in New York was named Poems: 1920, whilst the London edition was called Ara Vos Prec, a quote from Dante's Commedia.

This collection contains poems which are a notable stylistic departure for Eliot. An important, if ambivalent, voice in the debate surrounding free verse, Eliot's longer poems operate with what he called "the ghost of metre". Many of the 1920 poems are in strict tetrameter, structured as quatrains, and with very deliberate, almost ostentatious rhymes, following the scheme abxb. "Polyphiloprogenitive" appears in a poem called "Mr Eliot's Sunday Morning Service". Here's the beginning:

Polyphiloprogenitive
The sapient sutlers of the Lord
Drift across the window-panes.
In the beginning was the Word.

In the beginning was the Word.
Superfetation of τό ἔν,
And at the mensual turn of time
Produced enervate Origen.

The rhymes are near-ostentatious; the knowledge and frame of reference, definitely so, but the breadth of the vocabulary and the way Eliot makes it dance to his beat is thrilling to behold. The poem actually is a satire of the proliferation of different schools of Christian thought; but I'd argue that this is much less interesting than the mad words Eliot manages to make cohere.

"Polyphiloprogenitive" is, of course, Eliot's coinage. The lone, ballin' word occupying the entirety of the first line is a trick Eliot picked up from one of his key influences, Jules Laforgue. It's even harder to do in Eliot's English than it was in Laforgue's French, since English doesn't have as many adaptable polysyllabic words. What does it mean? Well, "producing a lot of children", basically. I'm quite surprised it hasn't been used (to my knowledge) in bragadaccio rap. The word "philoprogenitive" was probably read in David Friedrich Strauß's Das Leben Jesu (The Life of Jesus), a book which kicked up a massive controversy by portraying Jesus as historical and non-divine. It's a ballin' word to begin with, but Eliot adds "poly" to make it, quite literally, more ballin'. It certainly fits in with Eliot's concept of the "surprise" in poetry, and helps make the quatrains a pleasure to read, in spite of their pretty dreary subject matter.

4. KismetlyUsed by: Kristen Stewart
OF COURSE Kristen Stewart is a literary baller. Her poem "My Heart is a Wiffle Ball/Freedom Pole", published in Marie Claire, garnered considerable attention. Not because of its quality, or anything, but the fact that a HOLLYWOOD STAR had expressed themselves with POETRY is obviously big news.

There is one interesting word in the poem, though: "kismetly".

I reared digital moonlight

You read its clock, scrawled neon across that black

Kismetly... ubiquitously crest fallen

"Kismet" is a relatively recent (mid-19th century) borrowing from the Turkish, meaning "fate". It entered Turkish through the Arabic verb qasama, "to divide", which produced "qismat", which meant something like "portion", as in "here's your portion", through which it came to mean "fate". It's an interesting contrast to the Shakespeare passage, since non-Latinate borrowings into English are numerically quite rare-- the biggest group of them come in the area of Mathematics, which flourished in the Islamic world during the time Europeans call the dark ages (circa 600-1600). "Algebra", for instance, comes from the Arabic "al-jebr", meaning to put something back together.

It's been reported that Horatio Nelson, who died in 1805, said "Kismet, Hardy", to his flag captain on his deathbed, but the OED gives the first use of kismet as 1849. Moreover, it doesn't record an instance of kismet's adjectival form. So, Kristen Stewart, we salute your innovative esoteric vocabulary.

5. InterfenestrationNot used by: Oli Hazzard
"Found" poetry, that is to say the "poetry" which keen eyes claim to be able to drag out from the mass of non-literary text we encounter every day, is very much on-trend in the mid-2010s. Good Found Poetry, on the other hand, is extremely rare. Oli Hazzard provides us with an example in his 2012 collection Between Two Windows. The poem is called "The Inability to Recall the Precise Word for Something", and is formed simply by placing the definitions of #rare and obscure words side-by-side. The poem begins:

The first person you see after leaving your house
One who always wants to know what's going on
To make money by any means possible
A surgical sponge accidentally left inside a patient's body
Given to incessant or idiotic laughter
An incestuous desire for one's sister
The act of mentally undressing someone
One who speaks or offers opinions on matters beyond their knowledge

I've annotated the lines with the word they define. The gambit works, I'd say, but more importantly, it also opens the readers' eyes to a treasure trove of phenomenally #rare vocabulary. Coming across this poem in 2014, for me, was like stumbling through a desert and praying for an oasis, and instead finding a shop selling ice cold cokes. Some ballin' words, indeed, but the most ballin' have yet to be written. I'm hopeful that more poets in 2014 will cast off the shackles of theory and systematization and wallow in the richness of the language.