Notes & Asides

□ Dear Mr. Buckley:

All the boys and girls here in the quality-control lab at Signs and Wonders, Inc., want to thank you for your efforts on behalf of the English language. We have only one minor criticism, and that is that you don’t go quite far enough. It is all very well to throw a few velleities and enthymemes at people of good will, but none of these words is sufficiently universe-boggling to handle some of the sterquilinians that increasingly hound the righteous in, lo! these End Times. What you need is cactolith! The unabridged Glossary of Geology (American Geological Institute, 1974) defines this wonderful word as follows: “a quasihorizontal chonolith composed of anastomosing ductoliths whose distal ends curl like a harpolith, thin like a sphenolith, or bulge discordantly like an akmolith or ethmolith.”

Featured Tags

Manage following

William F. Buckley Jr.

□ Dear Mr. Buckley:

All the boys and girls here in the quality-control lab at Signs and Wonders, Inc., want to thank you for your efforts on behalf of the English language. We have only one minor criticism, and that is that you don’t go quite far enough. It is all very well to throw a few velleities and enthymemes at people of good will, but none of these words is sufficiently universe-boggling to handle some of the sterquilinians that increasingly hound the righteous in, lo! these End Times. What you need is cactolith! The unabridged Glossary of Geology (American Geological Institute, 1974) defines this wonderful word as follows: “a quasihorizontal chonolith composed of anastomosing ductoliths whose distal ends curl like a harpolith, thin like a sphenolith, or bulge discordantly like an akmolith or ethmolith.”