There is a lot to love about this word.
- How many words can boast three E’s in the first four letters? (Okay, epee is one, but that word is lame).
- It has two Y’s, and we all love Y because it’s the underdog of the vowels; everybody wants to see more Y (it sleeps with both X and Z, what a slut!)
- It just sssslides off the tongue…eleeMOsynary…eleeMOsynary.
- Its meaning is a complete surprise: “of, relating to, or dependent on charity”.
- It weighs in at a bulky six syllables but moves like it’s three.
- It can actually be defined in less syllables than it takes to speak the word (i.e. “of charity”). And considering how few people are familiar with it, using it in public means…
- …there is no way to actually use this word without sounding like a complete suckfuck. Normally, I have a problem with this. But there is a point at which a word becomes so completely out of complete snooty proportion, it becomes loveable, like a bad movie, or a puppy with two broken legs and also somebody chopped its tail off and made it wear a stupid hat.
My first question: do people who work for charitable organizations get to use this word a lot? Do they call up donors and say “may we count on your eleemosynary contribution this year”? Of course, the recipient of that phone call would probably just hang up, but oh! Maybe the executives say it a lot! They’d be all like “our eleemosynary activities for the eleemosynary year are expanding in an eleemosynary way thanks to our eleemosynary phone banks working ’round the clock to raise eleemosynary capital”. And then the other guy would be all like, “dude, you are so high right now…”
My second question: does NPR know about this word? Considering their audience is pretty snooty, they could really bank it on this word. So you’d have Tom Ashbrook going, “we are, like, SOOO eleemosynary. Really really really eleemosynary. EleeMOsynary.”
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