Word of the Week: Mumpsimus

Mumpsimus: Stubborn insistence on an incorrect usage (e.g., "between you and I" or "nucular") even after being proved wrong.

Mumpsimus is an example of what it describes: according to World Wide Words, the word was accidentally coined by a medieval monk who persisted in saying a phrase in the Latin Eucharist incorrectly, "either because he was illiterate and had learned it that way or because it had been transcribed incorrectly in his copy":

Instead of “quod in ore sumpsimus”, he would say “quod in ore mumpsimus”. Now sumpsimus is Latin for “we have taken” (the full phrase means “which we have taken into the mouth”), but mumpsimus is just nonsense.

What made this particular mistake memorable is what the monk was supposed to have said when he was corrected. According to the version of the incident told in 1517 by Richard Pace, later the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, the monk replied that he had said it that way for forty years and “I will not change my old mumpsimus for your new sumpsimus”.

As a result, the word came to be applied to someone who sticks obstinately to their old ways, in spite of the clearest evidence that they are wrong. The word can also have the related meaning of some custom or notion that is adhered to, even though it has been shown to be unreasonable.

Over the centuries sumpsimus came to have an independent meaning of "persistence in using a strictly correct term, as a rejection of a more common but erroneous term." In a column for the San Francisco Chronicle that started out lamenting a failed sump pump and meandered over to sumptuary and sumpsimus, Jon Carroll wrote that "There's a lot of sumpsimus around 'enormity' right now."

That's because the sticklers hew to a dictionary definition of enormity—"monstrously wicked"—while more casual writers and speakers use enormity interchangeably with enormousness. In fact, enormity and enormousness were synonymous until the 19th century. Read what World Wide Words has to say about President Obama's use of "the enormity of the task" in his victory speech last November.

 

Comments

[Karen]

I'm not willing to use a word in a new, or even newish, way until it's very widely accepted. To me, "enormity" still has a negative connotation, so I use it only in that way.

To quote Alexander Pope:

In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold
Alike fantastic, if too new, or old
Be not the first by whom the new are tried
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

Language and fashion in the same verse, just for you! :-)

I like mumpsimus, by the way.

[mike]

Great word, although it does require the whole story to get the point. Like "mondegreen," I suppose, although "modegreen" has the benefit that everyone, and I mean everyone, has a personal example.

I admit that I have some ... confusion ... around the idea that there is any authority for determining the meaning of a word other than how people actually use it. Specifically, around the notion that someone can wake up one day and say "No, my investigations (that do not account for how people are currently using this word) have determined that what the word ACTUALLY should mean is ...". Which is what seems to have happened with "enormity," along with a host of other words that have definitions honored primarily in usage guides, not in actual usage.

My man Goofy puts it this way [http://bradshawofthefuture.blogspot.com/2008/11/recently-i-saw-november-theatres-black.html]:

"Knowledge of etymology is completely unnecessary for using a language. What's necessary is not what words used to mean, but what words mean now. [...] Sometimes it is claimed that an earlier meaning of a word is its literal or real meaning, but really all that can be said is that an earlier meaning is an earlier meaning."

One of the LL dudes coined the term "zombie rule" for grammatical rules that are false (and have always been false), but cannot be killed. Perhaps we need a term along those lines for word definitions that live in dictionaries but not in people's mouths.

Anyway, thanks Nancy for another great post (and listening to all this blather ... :-) )

[Ari Herzog]

I knew something was amiss when I clicked in here and realized the word had nothing to do with mumps.

[Duchesse]

I received a thank-you note from an MD I had introduced at a conference; he thanked me for the "fulsome praise". I was irritated, because I had spoken sincerely.

Years later I realized that there was a second and competing meaning of "fulsome". My own version of mumpsimus was in continuing to be annoyed that he felt I was an excessive flatterer.

[goofy]

My man Mike's link doesn't work, try this: http://bradshawofthefuture.blogspot.com/2008/11/recently-i-saw-november-theatres-black.html