Hunt up obscure, unfamiliar words, rarely
used by the ancients, and have a heap of these in
readiness to launch at your audience. The many-headed crowd will look up to you and think you
amazing, and far beyond themselves in education,
if you call rubbing down ‘ destrigillation,’ taking a
sun-bath ‘insolation,’ advance payments ‘hansel,’
and daybreak ‘crepuscule.” Sometimes you must
yourself make new monstrosities of words and prescribe that an able writer be called fine-dictioned,
an intelligent man sage-minded, and a dancer handiwise. According to Lucian himself in the treatise On Dancing (69), the word xe:plcopos (handiwise) was applied to dancers by Lesbonax, a rhetorician, whose son was one of Tiberius’ teachers. Its appropriateness lay in the extensive use of gesture in Greek dancing. . If you commit a solecism or a barbarism, let
shamelessness be your sole and only remedy, and be
ready at once with the name of someone who is not
now alive and never was, either a poet or a historian,
saying that he, a learned man, extremely precise
in his diction, approved the expression. As for
reading the classics, don’t you do it—either that
twaddling Isocrates or that uncouth Demosthenes or
that tiresome Plato. No, read the speeches of the
men who lived only a little before our own time, and




 

these pieces that they call ‘exercises,’ I.e., declamations. in order to
secure from them a supply of provisions which you
can use up as occasion arises, drawing, as it were, on
the buttery.