It's not often that a student introduces a word I've never seen before, and when it happens, it's generally the result of inventive spelling. Very rarely does a student offer up a useful and satisfying term like the one I learned yesterday when a freshman writer gave me "circumbendibus."
Say it out loud: it fills the mouth deliciously, and it sounds like what it means--a circuitous, bendy route. Michael Quinion over at World Wide Words explains that circumbendibus "was created in the late seventeenth century as humorous fake Latin from circum-, around, plus English bend, plus the Latin ending -ibus." Goldsmith used it in She Stoops to Conquer as a noun meaning something like "roundabout way" with overtones of "wild goose chase." Quinion produces only two examples (from Goldsmith and Walter Scott) and asserts that writers continue to employ the term occasionally, but I found so few instances that I have to wonder where a freshman came up with such a rarity.
The answer, of course, is in the box--the little hand-held translators many of our Chinese students use to help them find the words they need to communicate in English. Sometimes these translators offer up words that are denotatively correct but inappropriate for the context--too earthy, too formal, too archaic. In this case, the student was writing about different approaches to writing tasks. Americans, he says, tend to get straight to the point, while Chinese writers use more circumbendibus.
For which I am grateful, because a word that wonderful ought not to be relegated to the bendy byways of the English language.
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