Appreciating the unfamiliar word

The more you read, I suppose, the more likely you are every now and then to come unexpectedly on an entirely new word - new to yourself, I mean. It's happened to me twice in the last week. First 'apolaustic'.

I met it in Hesketh Pearson's biography of Oscar Wilde: "Along with his laziness went a love of luxury. His nature was apolaustic, and the things he enjoyed were usually expensive."

Now the prefix 'apo-' shows that this word must be based on Greek, like apoplexy and apology and apostrophe. But there is no Greek verb 'lau-o' (my Greek dictionary tells me that even in the classical period it was obsolete) though the adjective apolaustikos meant 'of or for enjoyment'. It was first used in an English context in the mid-nineteeth century, so not many people know it. It doesn't seem to have caught on very much in a hundred and fifty years either, even though we have no other single word that I can think of it that we can use instead*. But now you know.

* 'Hedonistic' is too strong, implying a philosophy of personal comfort and shameless self-indulgence. 'Sybaritic' goes even further, suggesting almost an orgy of sensual pleasures: the ancient inhabitants of Sybaris in Italy were Greek colonials, renowned for 'effeminate voluptuosity'.

The other new word is one I found in a book by Alan Bennett. "Much of what I've written in Telling Tales could have been told to an interviewer . . . . It could also be done on a chat show. Probed by the caring, maieutic voice of the interviewer, you regurgitate with a fetching spontaneity recollections you have already recollected for some nervous young researcher beforehand . . ."

Maieutic ? Greek again ? Yes, indeed: the 'mai-' element is related to our word 'mother', and the Greek verb maieuomai means to 'serve as a midwife'. So the maieutic voice of Bennett's interviewer is, as it were, encouraging the birth of ideas and recollections from the guest's mind.

But if you are observant, you will have spotted that that Greek maieuomai (whether written in Greek or English letters, actually) has within it the five main vowels all in a row.

A further coincidence: last week I also came across (I can't at the moment remember where) the term 'miaou', as an alternative spelling to the more familiar 'miaouw'. It occurred to me that if we used it as a verb, in the past tense, then we would have the word 'miaoued' - another instance of all five vowels in a row. Well now, can you beat that ?

Appreciating the unfamiliar word