Guinness World Records — Words of the week

Last week’s word of the week was about Very. Long. Speeches. So this week, we’re keeping it short. If you’re succinct, it means you express yourself in a clear and brief way without adding unnecessary details – you’re concise and to the point. Which is ironic for a word that definitely has more ‘c’s in it than any word really needs.

Being succinct is a big part of the way I write for businesses – why use 10 words when you can use five? It saves everyone time. Like skipping ‘in order to’ – just say ‘to’. Seriously, try it.

Anyway, pitch over – back to ‘succinct’. This word comes from the Latin ‘succinctus’, which is the past participle of the verb ‘succingere’. And ‘succingere’ is formed from ‘sub’, which means ‘under’ (as in ‘submarine’, ‘subway’, ‘substandard’, and so on), and ‘cingere’, which means ‘to gird’ or ‘encircle’. The original Latin term actually referred to the act of tightening your belt – literally, not metaphorically.

Over time, ‘succinct’ evolved to describe something expressed concisely and clearly, just like tightening that belt. This change in meaning happened when the word came over into English in the late 15th century.

Someone who definitely isn’t succinct is Ananta Ram, from Kathmandu in Nepal, who holds the Guinness world record for the longest speech. It came in at a massive 90 hours and 2 minutes. The speech started at 6.15am on 27 August 2018, and finished at 12.17am on 31st August. Ram was silent for almost seven days beforehand to prepare.

Our very own Gyles Brandreth holds the record for the longest ever after-dinner speech at 12-and-a-half hours (which he did for charity – I can’t find it on the Guinness world records’ website though, so I’m not sure if it’s still valid). When he first broke the record he celebrated by doing a handstand, which you can see on his Instagram page. You can also book Gyles Brandreth for an after-dinner speech for the tidy sum of £10,000 to £15,000 – I’d be doing handstands too if I could earn that for a speech.

If something is picayune, it’s trivial or paltry. So you could say to someone ‘your opinions are picayune’ (if you’re mean and don’t want the person to realise). You can also use it as a noun, as in ‘our lives don't amount to a picayune in the grand scheme of things’. Which is depressing, sorry.

One silver Spanish real, from the reign of Peter I of Castile (1350–1369).

Picayune is a relatively modern word. In the 19th century, in Louisiana and other southern American states, a picayune was a small coin which wasn’t worth very much. Specifically, it was a Spanish half real – the real (meaning ‘royal’) was a Spanish unit of currency used for several hundred years after the mid-14th century. It was eventually replaced by the peseta in 1868.

The coin’s name comes from ‘picaioun’, a word that means ‘small coin’ in Occitan, a language spoken in French luxury cosmetic shops. I jest, of course (and apologise for the bad joke and product placement – although if anyone from L’Occitane is reading and would like to send me some free stuff, please do. I’m a particular fan of your hand cream) – it was spoken in Southern France. ‘Picaioun’ comes from the Occitan word ‘pica’, which means ‘to jingle’, as in the noise coins make when you have lots of them.

Just in case you don’t know what an aeroplane looks like (this might not be a Cessna though – no idea).

Further investigation into the word ‘pica’ led me to an eating disorder when people crave things that aren’t food. First described by Hippocrates way-back-when, in this context ‘pica’ actually has completely different etymology, and comes from the Latin word for ‘magpie’, a bird believed to eat anything.

This investigation then took me back to France (the internet is a wonderful thing) and one Michel Lotito, an entertainer who was famous for eating things that you shouldn’t. Known as Monsieur Mangetout (‘Mr Eat-All’), over the course of his 57-year lifetime, he ate 18 bicycles, 15 shopping carts, 7 TVs, 6 chandeliers, 2 beds, a pair of skis, a computer, a waterbed, 500 metres of steel chain, a coffin (with handles), 45 door hinges and even a bloody aeroplane (a Cessna 150, if you’re interested), which took him two years to get through. He was awarded a brass plaque by Guinness World Records to commemorate his abilities, and he ate that too. Lotito died in 2007 after a heart attack – and his death was apparently nothing to do with his ‘unusual’ diet.