'Nothing So Much as Mincing Poetry'

While reading the history plays again, I’ve been keeping a list of peculiar, amusing, exotic-sounding words, and words I don’t remember having encountered before. I love these choice little discoveries. My only disappointment is that such words are virtually unusable. They would be gibberish to most people, whether in writing or speech, and would end up sounding pretentious and incoherent. Here’s a passage from Henry IV, Part 1 (Act 3, Scene 1), in which Hotspur is complaining about Owen Glendower’s bloviation: “Sometime he angers me With telling me of the moldwarp and the ant, Of the dreamer Merlin and his prophecies, And of a dragon and a finless fish, A clip-winged griffin and a moulten raven, A couching lion and a ramping cat, And such a deal of skimble-skamble stuff As puts me from my faith.” Translation into modern English: “He talks too much.” Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary identifies skimble-skamble as an adjective meaning “wandering; wild,” but dismisses it as “cant.” The OED…