Whoever invented this word, he didn’t do it extemporaneously, because this word is totally ridiculous and that’s why I love it. It’s too long, it’s cumbersome, too complicated, and when you use it you’re pretty much guaranteed to end all conversation. You may get your shins kicked and your throat slashed. But your options are limited if you want to describe an action as “spoken or performed without preparation”. There’s “ad hoc” and “impromptu”, but those words sound like they were built with matchsticks and rubber paste, and you can’t turn them into robust, meaty adverbs. And cousin “spontaneously” doesn’t have quite the same meaning. So if somebody says something extemporaneously, you have no choice but to form all seven syllables, turn your whole body into the point of an asshole, and say it in order to describe it. And now everybody hates you and you TOTALLY deserve it.
What really surprised me is that this word is OLD. A word that long and cumbersome surely was invented yesterday by some cheese-eating Frenchman in a turtleneck and tiny round spectacles, when in fact this word came straight to English from Medieval Latin, which got it from the Latin ex tempore. So the asshole pedigree has never been apart from this word since its creation by Roman pedophiles in the year negative whatever.
Post a Comment