Hapax legomenon – here for a good time, not a long time

Depending on your literary leanings, you might think that hapax legomenon sounds like one of the Unforgivable Curses from Harry Potter or Slartibartfast’s lesser-known brother who didn’t get to design any fjords. In reality, it’s a posh way of saying something quite simple. A hapax legomenon is a word (or phrase) that appears only once in a particular text, or even only once in the entire known body of a language. Once. That’s it. It shows up, does its thing, then vanishes without even leaving a helpful footnote saying ‘by the way, this means a hat’. Rude.

words with commitment issues

The term hapax legomenon comes from Greek and literally means ‘said once’. One of the most famous hapax legomena (that’s the plural) comes from the Hebrew Bible. The word ‘tachash’ appears only once (in Exodus 25:5) and refers to a type of animal skin used to cover the Tabernacle. And because it only turns up once, no one’s completely sure what animal it was. Badger? Dolphin? Unicorn? Scholars have been arguing about it for centuries because there’s nothing else to compare it with.

(Oh, and just in case you think I was making a joke with those animal suggestions, I actually wasn’t – proper academic interpretations range from a specific creature like a dugong, dolphin or seal due to links to Arabic words, to a unique one-horned, multi-coloured animal created miraculously for the Tabernacle, which then disappeared forever. Just like hapax legomena.)

Shakespeare is another rich source of one-hit wonders – he’s actually credited with hundreds of words that appear only once in his work, leaving scholars to argue for centuries about whether he invented them, spelled something else wrong or was just having an off day. Like ‘honorificabilitudinitatibus’ which appears only once, in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, presumably because he couldn’t be bothered to try to spell it again. It’s a real Latin-based word (and also the longest word in the English language to strictly alternate between consonants and vowels, fact fans), and means something like ‘the state of being able to achieve honours’. Another example is ‘puking’, which turns up in ‘As You Like It’ and only ‘As You Like It’ (I guess he didn’t like it). Of course, ‘puking’ is very familiar now, but its first recorded use in English is Shakespeare’s, and it appears only that one time in his work.

In praise of words that couldn’t commit

Hapax legomena are linguistic butterflies – brief, baffling and often beautiful. They remind us that language isn’t neat or fully documented, and that sometimes a word pops into existence, waves politely then disappears forever.

Why do Americans call full stops ‘periods’?

When I came up with this idea, I thought it would probably be an easy answer. But once I started looking into it, it turned out that it’s not. And it involves Aristophanes. Sorry.

The details

The first thing to know is that the terms ‘full stop’ and ‘period’ didn’t always refer to exactly the same thing – or even to exactly the same kind of punctuation.

‘Period’ comes from the Greek word ‘periodos’ meaning ‘way around’ or ‘circuit’. Originally, it referred to a complete thought or sentence in writing – and, by extension, the mark that showed the end of that. While this might still look like a full stop to the untrained eye (i.e. everyone), you could actually put it in different positions to show different lengths of pause.

This (some might say overly complicated and possibly unnecessary) system was developed by Greek grammarian Aristophanes of Byzantium around the 3rd century BCE. He introduced three types of marks for different lengths of pause:

• high period (˙): at the top of the line, this showed a long pause or a complete thought, similar to a full stop

• middle period (·): slightly raised, this represented a medium-length pause

• low period (.): at the bottom, this represented the (you’ve guessed it) shortest pause.

To be fair to Aristophanes, this probably wasn’t just because he had too much time on his hands or he was envisaging torturing children in English classes for centuries to come. The different dots indicated the amount of breath someone would need to complete each fragment of text when reading it out loud – it actually wasn’t anything to do with grammar.

What happened next

This system continued through the Middle Ages in various forms. But by the 16th century, English printers and grammarians started to simplify punctuation (thank god). And while the high and middle periods were consigned to the punctuation retirement home, the low period mark became the main end-of-sentence marker in printed English. This gave rise to the name ‘full stop’, which is a very literal (and therefore unBritish) way of describing exactly what the punctuation mark does i.e. signal the end of a sentence.

I couldn’t really find an answer to why the Americans hung on to ‘period’ while we adopted ‘full stop’ (which kind of renders this whole post moot, but let’s crash on anyway). Some people on the internet said that it’s because Americans can be more prescriptivist than us Brits, but I couldn’t possibly comment on that. American English developed when ‘period’ was still common in British English, so it might just be that they didn’t change it because they didn’t want to.

Whatever the reason, by the 18th century, ‘period’ had become the standard term in American English for that punctuation mark. While in Britain, ‘full stop’ hung around instead. (Oh, and just to confuse things even more, English printers decided to call it a ‘full point’. But that’s another post for another time.)