Lafferty’s knack for weird and wonderful words is a big part of the joy of reading him. His stories don’t just tell—they sing, hum, crackle, and bang with the pleasure of language. Some of that magic lies in the odd, rare, and sometimes completely made-up words he slips in, all part of his linguistic mischief.
One of my favorites? Gynotikolobomassophile—his coinage for someone who loves women with fat ankles.
For anyone tracking down these linguistic curiosities, a good place to start is with what linguists call hapax legomena—words that appear only once in an author’s body of work. I’ve compiled a full list of Lafferty’s hapaxes from his short fiction, which you’ll find attached.
But in the meantime, here are some of his strangest and most delightful oddities. Some are his own inventions, some are simply obscure, but all of them are fun:
Adynatogenesis – The creation of impossibilities (a- "not" + dynatos "possible" + genesis "origin").
Akymatic – Without waves (a- "not" + kyma "wave").
Alogos – Without reason (a- "not" + logos "word, reason").
Anemonead – Related to windflowers (anemōnē "windflower" + -ad "group").
Cacemphatic – Badly expressive (kakos "bad" + emphatikos "emphatic").
Chryselephantine – Golden and ivory (chrysos "gold" + elephas "ivory").
Enteropneustron – A creature that breathes through its guts (enteron "intestine" + pneustos "breathed").
Logogriphs – Word puzzles (logos "word" + griphos "riddle").
Porphyrogenite – Born into nobility (porphyra "purple" + genitos "born").
Schedonanthropologist – A near-expert on humanity (schedon "almost" + anthropos "human" + -logist "one who studies").
Stauroscopus – A watcher of crosses (stauros "cross" + skopos "observer").
It would be great to have something like Dan Temianka’s Jack Vance Lexicon for Lafferty (link).
Like Vance, Lafferty didn’t just use words—he played with them, reshaped them, pulled them from the depths of history, and conjured them out of nowhere. Vance's polysyllables fit seamlessly into his mandarin eloquence, while Lafferty, somehow, made them an essential aspect of his own version of wild secondary orality.
It’s one of the many reasons his work is so unlike anything else.
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