FRAME-PERSON is an old English dialect word for an overnight visitor whose stay demands a great deal of planning beforehand.— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 11 July 2016
Which, as our friends at UWG English pointed out, is probably not the most appropriate word for that kind of person…:
I call this person a "NEVER-AGAIN." https://t.co/u6FsU53yFs— UWG English (@uwgenglish) 11 July 2016
But what about all the other characters that we know and love and love to hate? What other words are hiding out in the dictionary to describe them?
Well, from unknowledgeable critics to penniless friends, this week’s HH YouTube instalment is looking at 10 words for precisely those kinds of people:
One word that didn’t make the final cut here, however, was zoilist:
A ZOILIST is an unfair or unnecessarily harsh critic, or someone who particularly enjoys finding fault in things.— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 13 May 2015
Just as (spoiler alert if you haven’t watched the video yet...) the ultracrepidarians of this world take their name from a story from Ancient Greece, the carping zoilists have their roots in a fourth-century BC Greek grammarian and literary critic named Zoilus of Amphipolis.
Born in what is now Macedonia c.400 BC, Zoilus was one of the most scathing critics of the Greek poet Homer. Despite being the author of both the Iliad and Odyssey and one of the most well respected writers of Ancient Greece, writing two cornerstones of Western literature was not enough, it seems, to impress Zoilus.
In a long-lost essay called Homeric Questions, Zoilus challenged Homer’s portrayal of the gods, and called out a number of plot holes and inconsistencies in his works: in the Iliad, for instance, Menelaus dies in battle only to be seemingly revived to witness the death of his son several pages later. Other writers might have fallen victim to Zoilus’ criticizing glare of the years, but it was for these criticisms of Homer’s writing that Zoilus was best known—and for which he deservedly the nickname Homeromastix, the “Scourge of Homer”, among his contemporaries.
Zoilus’s writings have not survived, and as a result it’s unclear just how harsh his criticism really was. But the enduring popularity of Homer’s works has nevertheless led to history being somewhat less kind to his harshest critic.
Born in what is now Macedonia c.400 BC, Zoilus was one of the most scathing critics of the Greek poet Homer. Despite being the author of both the Iliad and Odyssey and one of the most well respected writers of Ancient Greece, writing two cornerstones of Western literature was not enough, it seems, to impress Zoilus.
In a long-lost essay called Homeric Questions, Zoilus challenged Homer’s portrayal of the gods, and called out a number of plot holes and inconsistencies in his works: in the Iliad, for instance, Menelaus dies in battle only to be seemingly revived to witness the death of his son several pages later. Other writers might have fallen victim to Zoilus’ criticizing glare of the years, but it was for these criticisms of Homer’s writing that Zoilus was best known—and for which he deservedly the nickname Homeromastix, the “Scourge of Homer”, among his contemporaries.
Zoilus’s writings have not survived, and as a result it’s unclear just how harsh his criticism really was. But the enduring popularity of Homer’s works has nevertheless led to history being somewhat less kind to his harshest critic.
Various historical accounts record that Zoilus died having been thrown from a cliff by an angry mob, stoned to death on the island of Chios, or else tossed alive on top of a funeral pyre in Smyrna. Whether any of these gruesome demises ever truly occurred is debateable, but instead it’s likely that they are all just myths and smears rooted in little more than the unpopularity of Zoilus’s opinions—but it’s precisely those opinions that led to Zoilus the zoilist earning a permanent place in the language.
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