And lo!, we come to the two thousandth postage at Hooting Yard. (Two thousand, that is, in the current format. There are an additional nine-hundred-and-fifty or so postages in the 2003 -2006 Archive.) I suggested divers methods of celebration when we hit one thousand, so you might want to go and read that.

Now there are so many posts that, were each one a year, they would stretch back as near as dammit to the birth of Christ, I am minded to mark two thousand more quietly. Hooting Yard is, I hope, quite clearly a place for those intoxicated by love of words. So what better way to celebrate than with a quotation containing an extraordinary, and sadly neglected, coinage?

I retired myselfe among the merrie muses, and by the worke of my pen and inke, have dezinkhornifistibulated a fantasticall Rapsody of dialogisme, to the end that I would not be found an idle drone among so many famous teachers and professors of noble languages.

That is from the preface to Ortho-epia Gallica by John Eliot (1593). According to Charles Nicholl, “the Ortho-epia Gallica is a curious and colourful work : ostensibly a language-manual, of the type very popular in cosmopolitan London, it turns out on closer inspection to be a lampoon of other language-manuals and of the foreigners who wrote them”.

My source is Charles Nicholl’s A Cup Of News : The Life Of Thomas Nashe (1984), wherein I also gleaned those other recent bits of Nashery.