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Can you translate the following sesquipedalians into "common English"?

Here is an old proverb: While bryophytic plants are typically encountered as substrata of earthly or mineral matter in concreted state, discrete substrata elements occasionally display a roughly spherical configuration which, in the presence of suitable gravitational and other effects, lends itself to a combined translatory and rotational motion. One notices in such cases an absence of the otherwise typical accretion of bryophyta.


The proverb means: “A rolling stone gathers no moss.”



What was a young man saying to a young woman in the following sesquipedalian?


They shine more rutilent than ligulin—those labial components that surround thy pericranial orifice, wherein denticulations niveous abound!

Commingle them with my equivalents! Let like with like nectareously converge! From the predestined confluence some sempiternal rapture must emerge!


As Willard Espy put it, “After all, he was only asking her for a kiss. Jargon may be useful to hide one’s real thinking, or lack of it, but it can be downright self-defeating if you are trying to persuade someone to do something. A young man learned that when he addressed these words to the maiden he loved, only to be shown the door.”

Both of the foregoing were compiled by Willard R. Espy.


The letters MS refer to two things: One is a debilitating and surprisingly widespread affliction that renders the sufferer barely able to perform the simplest task; the other is a disease. In other words, MS stands for the name of a well-known software company or for the disease Multiple Sclerosis.

This entry is located in the following unit: Focusing on Words Newsletter #12 (page 1)