Vernility and the Mincing of Citizens

Samuel Pepys’s friend and fellow-founder of the Royal Society, John Evelyn, was a genuinely learned dilettante. He once prepared a schedule of headings under which the English language might be assessed and eventually improved - rather as the Académie Française were busy pontificating about French at about the same time.

His first suggestion was to “Conceive the Reason both of Additions to and Corruptions of the English Language (as of most other Tongues)”. Among the possible sources of addition and corruption Evelyn listed Plantations and Colonies, Staples of Commerce, Pedantry of Scholes, Pulpets, Style of Court, the Barr, and ‘Vernilitie and Mincing of Citizens’.

The Mincing of Citizens sounds painful, but must be related to what we may call ‘mincing’ behaviour or speech today - self-consciously affected mannerisms, somewhat as we imagine Oscar Wilde must have practised, or of the kind that so miffed the prophet Isaiah: “The daughters of Zion are haughty and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet”. Enough to disturb any righteous citizen.

As for Vernilitie, it isn’t in my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, but no doubt is featured in the full OED. I reckon it is a nonce-word coined by Evelyn from the French verb vernisser or vernir (meaning to glaze or varnish), referring to the desire of mincing talkers to embellish their sentences with fancy terms. Evelyn also had a word for those who devised new words, and that was ‘logodaedali’, from the name of Daedalus, the legendary artificer of Athens who not only invented many different craftsmen’s tools, but created the labyrinth at Knossos in Crete where the minotaur was housed, and a set of wings with which he was able to fly over the Aegean sea. The Greeks had a word daidaleos meaning ‘cunningly or curiously wrought’. Evelyn must have been aware (or, at least, I hope he was) that his own use of ‘logodaedali’ and ‘vernilitie’ were themselves the product of his own scholarly logodaedalic vernility. Unscholarly logodaedalicity has become a characteristic of modern English: there’s yet another one for the lexicon.

Vernility and the Mincing of Citizens