Exploring the lexical delights of words with the -arian suffix

For me, the OED is one vast variety chocolate box: dip my mitts in, and I’m sure to haul out something lexically delicious. For no obvious reason, I decided to look at the suffix –arian , as in the antidisestablismentarian of the unforgettable and legendary antidisestablismentarianism.

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I wasn’t disappointed. And it turns out that antidisestablishmentarians are far from alone.

I don’t mean theologically, of course. I mean that a wildcard search in the OED for *arian retrieves precisely 500 headwords. Not all are genuine –arian formations, because that search retrieves, for instance, Hungarian, which makes use of the –an suffix, while Elgarian uses the –ian suffix, as does the rather rarer Omarian, ‘a student or admirer of Omar Khayyam’. It owes its coining to the existence of the Omar Khayyam club, founded in 1892 and designed to bring together admirers of Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubáiyát over dinner:

Mr. Hudson has received a piece of plate from his brother Omarians on the occasion of his marriage.

Sketch, 31 March 398/2, 1897

Excluding those and similar from the catch, still leaves well over 450 in my net. Oops. I’ve swapped metaphors mid-stream – yet another metaphor – but never mind.

(From now on, all definitions enclosed in quotation marks are from the OED; all dates in brackets are the date of the earliest OED citation.)

The most recent coinage is…a flexitarian (1998), someone who follows a mostly non-meat diet but may indulge occasionally, as the mood takes them. Which, if you’ll allow me a little rant, is wholly in line with the corrosive modern tendency to privilege subjective mood over objective moral codes.

The icky neologism touted by the Food Channel is ‘flexitarian’, which is a meat-eating semi-vegetarian who determines his/her eating preference based on mood rather than ideology.

Atlanta Journal & Constitution, 31 July q2/4, 1998.

‘Icky’ sums it up pretty nicely.

And the oldest is nummularian, from around 1429, meaning ‘a money-changer’. In fact, in a sense it’s a bit of a cheat, because it takes an existing Latin word, nummŭlārĭus, and tacks the –an suffix onto its ending ārĭus. Which is the basis of all these –arian words, the difference being that many others creatively add the suffix to existing English words, such as identity à identitarian, authority à authoritarian, and so forth.

Big digression coming. Skip to the next heading if you’re short of time.

I’ll digress massively here, but bear with. First, nummularian seems at first glance to be an instance of that lexicographer’s delight, a hapax legomenon, that is, a word or phrase found only once in a text or in a corpus of a writer’s work. The OED labels it ‘Obsolete. rare’. They’re not kidding.

Second, the citation the OED gives seems to refer to Christ throwing the money-changers out of the temple, ‘The Cleansing of the Temple’, as recorded in all four gospels.

Third, the manuscript in which it appears has two different spellings for the word – hardly unusual at that date – which, as you can see below,  has been lifted straight from the Latin:

He ouerthrewe the bordes & shedde the monee of the numelariens [glossed of the chaungours; Latin nummulariorum].

For the Pharisens in the Temple sett collibists and numularies [glossed comvne chaungers or vsurers; Latin nummularios] Þat who þat wantid offring myght borowe of thaym some penyes.

The mirour of mans saluacioun (before 1429)

I wonder if two different spellings means that neither is a hapax, or both are. Discuss.

(‘bordes’ above means ‘tables’; think German Bord and Danish bord; ‘shedde’ means here ‘scattered’; collibist is an obsolete word for a money-changer, loaned into English from Latin collybista, which in turn borrowed it from Greek κολλυβιστής, a not uncommon journey for many English words.)

Fourth and last, the Lewis & Short Latin dictionary tells me that the Roman emperor Galba, while governor of the Spanish province of Hispania Tarraconensis, had the hands of a crooked money-dealer chopped off and attached to his counter: nam et nummulario non ex fide uersanti pecunias manus amputatuit mensæque eius adfixit (For, a money-dealer having committed some irregularity in his dealings, he cut off his hands and attached them to his counter.)

Digression ends

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A very twentieth-century thang

The last decade of the last century saw the coining of these five –arianisms: flexitarian, cyberlibertarian, Trustafarian, cybrarian and pescatarian. I’ve already discussed the first.

Cyberlibertarian (1994) denotes someone opposed to that perennial hot topic, regulation of the internet.

Trustafarian (1992) is decidedly tongue in cheek, a portmanteau of trust as in trust fund and Rastafarian, to describe…well, the OED has to go to great lengths in its definition to conjure up the kind of person the word defines: ‘A wealthy young (usually white) person with a bohemian lifestyle, typically one who adopts aspects of the appearance and culture of other ethnic groups, esp. Rastafarians, and who lives in or frequents a fashionable, multicultural area. Frequently mildly derogatory.’

Here…is the home of ‘Trustafarians’—rich white kids who subscribe to the notion of West London bohemia.

Guardian 8 January (Weekend Supplement) 15/3, 1994

I remember chuckling at its wit when I first came across it, but now I wonder if it’s had its day. Certainly, Google Ngrams shows it peaking in 2012.

Cybrarian (1991) is a new one on me and one, I suspect, which will only be found in a very subject-specific discourse: ‘A person who is practised at finding information on the internet on behalf of others, or who compiles or administers a library of reference material online’.

Note how the Guardian scare-quotes this, to my mind, ungainly portmanteau of cyber + librarian.

And where UK Online and Europe Online employ editors, Planet Internet has ‘cybrarians’ to help people get the most from the Net.

Guardian 18 April (OnLine section) 4/5, 1996

And last, and most certainly not least in these five, comes pescatarian(1991), someone whose ‘meat’ intake consists solely of fish.

The spelling pesca– had always bothered me, naively thinking it must be based on Latin piscis, that useful comparator for the workings of Grimm’s Law (compare Fisch, fish, fisk, etc). In fact, so the OED says, it’s based on the Italian pesce, for fish, so should be pescetarian, with the –sc– pronounced /ʃ/ ). But that had obviously not taken off, so we’re left with –ca– and /k/. In any case, I suspect the spelling foxes many people. I think it would be a lot easier if we replaced it with the good old no-nonsense and slightly humorous fishetarian (1919).

The most frequent?

The top five are a bit of a disappointment: Hungarian (as discussed) followed by librarian (1670), followed by agrarian (adj.; 1593), both based directly on Latin) then two based on English words, authoritarian (1856) and humanitarian (?1792), which at that time and originally meant someone who denied Christ’s divinity.

What kinds of discourse are they most frequent in?

To every meaning of a word the OED assigns a ‘field label’, an indication of the kind of discourse where you’re likely to find it. While ‘arts/literature’ has twelve – nuditarian (1836), anyone? an artist who advocates the study of the nude (would Lucian Freud be in this category? – and ‘politics/…seventeen – an Icarian anyone? (defined at the end) – the largest single field is ‘religion & belief’, with its ninety-seven entries. These could be worth a whole book in their own right, covering some arcane, bizarre, outrageous or obsolete beliefs and practices, so I’ve excerpted a fistful at random:

tempestarian (1720; and it looks like another hapax. Marked ‘Obsolete. rare):

decrees were made against Calculators, Inchanters, and ‘Tempestrians’, as they are called, that is Raisers of storms and Tempests.

J. Bingham, Origines Ecclesiasticæ vol. VII. xvi. v. 291, 1720

anniversarian: ‘An officer in a religious house with responsibility for the commemoration of the anniversaries of founders, benefactors, etc.’ (1892 in this sense, but in earlier (1856) US use for ‘A person elected to represent a society at an anniversary event and to deliver a commemorative address’.

anythingarian (before 1704; a person who has no fixed set of moral or religious beliefs). This is an appealing one, and probably describes a good half of British humanity these days. Though coined in the eighteenth century, its latest OED citation is from 2008. That said, in a corpus of 14 billion words, it’s vanishingly infrequent at two examples, both from the same illustrious or reprehensible source, according to taste, as per the third example below.

Lady Smart. What religion is he of? Ld. Sparkish. Why, he is an Anythingarian.

J. Swift, Complete Collection of Genteel Conversation 62 (1738)

[Quoting Byron] I may rather be called an Any-chæan, or an Anything-arian. How do you like my sect? The sect of Anything-arians sounds well, does it not?

T. Medwin, Journal Conversat. Byron 1821 & 1822 79, (1824)

A worker who takes an anythingarian attitude towards the history of his own movement cannot be considered class-conscious.

The Ideological Struggle in The Working-Class Movement
From V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, 4th English Edition,

Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964, Vol. 20, pp. 277-80. Translated from the Russian by Bernard Isaacs and Joe Fineberg, Edited by Julius Katzer

Anythingarian’s nihilistic opposite the originally US nothingarian (1776) is also one to savour.

He return’d a strange jumble of Calvinism, Republicanism, & a great deal of other isms, which in the Aggregate, make, what I have heard call’d, a Nothingarian both in Politics & Religion.

J. Boucher, Letter 10 July in Maryland Historical Magazine (1914) vol. 9 66, 1776

pulpitarian (1654): ‘A preacher, a pulpiteer’.

quartodecimarian (1666): It sounds as if it relates to a number, and it does, to a very special one:

‘Any of a group of early Christians who celebrated Easter on the day of the Jewish Passover (the 14th of Nisan), whether this was a Sunday or not. The practice (chiefly observed in Proconsular Asia) was condemned by the Council of Nicaea, a.d. 325.’

adessenarian (1744) ‘A person who believes in the real presence of Christ’s body in the Eucharist, but does not explain the presence by transubstantiation’. This is based on Latin, not on a pre-existing noun but on the verb adesse, ‘to be present’.

And finally, antidisestablishmentarian (1889). The two negative prefixes anti– and dis– surely ought to cancel each other out and mean that such a person is in favour of establishment, surely? Not quite. Such people were against the disestablishment of the Church of England, given that the Church of England is the ‘established’ church’, which means it is constitutionally recognised as the official national church of England. This was a hot potato towards the end of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century, when certain sections of society wanted the Church of England disestablished, and occasionally resurfaces in the campaigns of godless humanists.

Identitarian

There is lots of blather online and in broadcasdt meedyah about the triumph of identity politics and identitarian wokeness, identitarian leftists, an identitarian worldview and so forth. So it was a surprise to discover the word dates back to…1912, but in a completely different meaning, ‘A person who believes that seemingly unrelated people or things are actually the same’:

A violent controversy [about whether the Hittites and the Khatti people shared the same identity] immediately broke out between Identitarians and Separatists.

Manchester Guardian, 27 April 7/2, 1912

The modern sense – ‘An advocate or supporter of an ideology or political agenda specific to his or her particular social, racial, or religious group, nationality, etc.’ – dates to 1997.

The issue of inequality. Here is a conviction both identitarians and economic populists on the left can agree on.

Newsday (New York), 26 January a34/3, 1997.

Another –arian that caught my eye is miscellanarian (1711), a writer of miscellanies, which I’m in danger of becoming in these blog posts.

And finally, my favourite and one I’ve had occasion to use tut-tuttingly to a former friend, is valetudinarian (1703, based on valetudinary, itself based on Latin valētūdinārius), ‘A person in weak health, esp. one who is constantly concerned with his or her own ailments’.

It’s a delight I first encountered in the opening chapter of Jane Austen’s Emma, as Austen describes Emma’s disappointment at the marriage of her governess and confidante.

‘The evil of the actual disparity in their ages (and Mr. Woodhouse had not married early) was much increased by his constitution and habits; for having been a valetudinarian all his life, without activity of mind or body, he was a much older man in ways than in years; and though everywhere beloved for the friendliness of his heart and his amiable temper, his talents could not have recommended him at any time.’

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And the meaning of Icarian is? When not pertaining to Icarus, as it did when coined in 1595, it refers – 1865 as noun, 1875 as adj. – to ‘Pertaining to or characteristic of Icaria, an ideal republic described in a work (Voyage en Icarie, 1840) by the French communist Etienne Cabet (1788–1856), afterwards taken as the name of several communistic settlements, established by Cabet at Nauvoo and elsewhere in U.S.

You can read about these fascinating Utopians here. Essential reading, I suggest, for all modern Marxists and head-in-the-clouds leftists.