Ghana’s MP and Deputy Minister of Finance Stephen Amoah left the country’s Parliament in stitches after he used an unfamiliar English word while addressing the House.
In a video that has surfaced on social media, Amoah was addressing the House, when he said “they do not have to do things in floccinaucinihilipilification”.
“I think we don’t have to bring in everything that will make our exercise be in floccinaucinihilipilification. I don’t think that is appropriate,” Amoah said.
This elicited a mass reaction among the MPs forcing Amoha to halt his speech.
An MP rose up on a point of order to complain, seemingly in jest, about the use of the word saying they could not understand what it meant.
This prompted the speaker to ask the MP to repeat the word and explain what it meant.
“The meaning of the word is exercises conducted without any fruits. Worthless exercises… And the word is floccinaucinihilipilification,” he explained.
The house yet again broke into laughter with the speaker casting doubt whether indeed it was an English word.
“I am tempted to believe this is a construct of your language, not English language,” the Speaker said.
Amoah defends himself by pointing out that the word is found in the Oxford Dictionary. He proceeded to spell it out, explaining that the word means “the action or habit of estimating something as worthless.”
The term is borrowed from Latin and combined with an English suffix. In Latin, words like floccī, naucī, nihilī, and pilī signify ‘at a small price’ or ‘at nothing,’ as enumerated in a well-known rule of the Eton Latin Grammar, combined with the suffix -fication.
According to Oxford, the word floccinaucinihilipilification appears fewer than 0.01 times per million words in modern written English.
