No matter who you are or what your personality, talents, habits, strengths, weaknesses, physical characteristics or attitudes, David Grambs has a word that describes you.
Grambs himself is a diaskeuast, or editor, of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, and known to be a logodaedalus, or one who uses words playfully, as he does in ”Dimboxes, Epopts, and Other Quidams: Words to Describe Life`s Indescribable People” (Workman, $5.95), a new paperback that no serious name-caller should be without.
Here you learn that a woman with a moustache is a baffona and a grossly fat person is a fustilugs, whom Grambs also describes as a ”major flesh schlepper” or an ”Armour personnel carrier.”
If you don`t want to come right out and call someone a yokel, call him an abderite. If he`s unbelievably stupid, dull and obtuse, call him a Boeotian, derived from Boeotia, an ancient Greek land whose inhabitants were thick of skull.
The true enosimaniac always fears that something dreadful will happen
–”not the roast burning but the whole house.” In comparison, the pessimist is a mere dabbler in dread.
Someone who is despicable may be called a foumart or foulmart. Grambs points out that ”an expressive but clean word that begins with the satisfying f is always good to keep in reserve for superior name-calling.”
Troublemakers come in splendid variety–from the catamaran, or quarrelsome scold, to the solopsist, or self-absorbed, self-referential me addict; from the blateroon, or compulsive chatterbox, to the mawworm, or pious, mealy-mouthed hypocrite.
Man-haters should know that a flaneur is an idle, lazy or sauntering man about town, that a meacock is weak, cowardly or lackluster, that a spado is chronically impotent.
Woman-haters should know that a bona-roba is flashy and loose, that a demi-vierge is a sexual tease, that a spoffokins is a trollop who pretends to be a lady.
