ZUGZWANG

The Matador network posted a great little article about unusual words with each word illustrated. My friend, the writer, Lauren B. Davis sent it to me, knowing that I love obscure words. Of course, I took it as a challenge to use all of the words in a story. I wasn't quite able to use them all in order, but I did manage to use them all, plus a bunch of other favourite obscure words.

ZUGZWANG

It is truth: look to those with those with intemperate and untampered heads, those virginal to barbers and stylists whose first-growth hairs have neither been severed nor tempered for they are possessed of the most truth, the undebunkable verities, the tales, and most candid learning, for history is locked in the distant ends of their do. And I am such an acerecomic, for save a handful lost in the turbulent clutches and snatching moil of a tavern bust-up, my hair has been dutifully preserved, permitted to grow as it so desires and by its own physics and gravity, like a treasured library, to expand and increase and thereby retain news of the past. Though we all have our nits to bear, our worms, the head is such a library and I am against the biblioclasms and libricides of those who would be shorn of history or fleas. For though our head is our hair shirt, our hirsute of many colours both brown and grey, I devote myself to such bibliogasms and storied pleasures of both head and history.

They spit at me, “You nit-tonsured cacodemonomanic! You believe yourself suffused with the refuse of past days, this history.” The smugwormy glibness of their tight smiles, the dactylion of their middle finger stuck deep inside their wordbooks, marking the source of this newly acquired lexical plunder they seek to heave against me.

But I know this is but enantiodromic fanfaronade! As witch with toad, they have turned this thing into its opposite, then parade in boasting swagger. They’ll not gorgonize me with mere bluster.

I may be obliged to scratch and tweeze, to herd the minions that scurry across my pate’s long grass, but I have no such prideful hamartia. History is in my hair and I stand by its tangle of lessons, whether unspeakable, too infandous for casual repetition, too odious for song or the weak, or worthy of the poetry intoned to the child and the dying.

Skeptics, doubters, forgetists! Barberists and those barbarous to knowledge! Mesmerists and antimnemonites! Human razors and those devoted to the obscurations of the past! If I could brush aside my fringes and cast the evil eye as a champion jettaturicist, if I could but have completed my diploma in ktenology and become shrewd in the science of death, the scraggy fingerling of your leptosomic bodies would snap under my osteniferous gaze.

For as I wander, montivagant, over hills and mountains, and those other various high places close to truth, I proclaim in words that should be understood by all, the verifiable assurity of pogonotrophic noegenesis! We create knowledge by cultivating our hair. We make Edenic knowledgetrees of our mustache, beard, and sideburns. The thicket of our armpits and pubic forests, the brambledom of our abdominal savannah.

I defy the fatuous quockerwodgers and rum bewilderers to deliver a recumbentibus, an argument sufficiently powerful to knock my faith in this history to the floor. They are but seized with the fetid loquacity and deluded scripturience of the ultracrepidarian and opine interminably and fulminate unceasingly on matters distant to them as God’s own dark star from the luminous excrescence of his ethereal brows.

This lexical tarantism wherein they must spin in the weltery web of their own deluded thought, their fervid brainstems a cotillion of bunkum does verily inspire me to seek a yonderly place of Classical reflection. I leave the sputtering objections of the abject xenizates who travel as blind strangers through the fecund and unshorn lands of memory, knowledge and reason, and peripateticate in vernalagic tranquilitude beneath the coppice of my own hirsute skull.

Instead, I leave them to the zugzwang of their own impoverished and atemporal incredulity—the prison cell of their present is so infinitesimal and bereft of feature like the cropped and fallow deathskull of forgetting that surely they shall languish in its silent, solitary and stony maw. Instead, I make my exuberant and attentive peregrinations to where history becomes shaggy with the fertile irrigations of memory and I have the rich tapestry of both past and future as the rich pilgrimage of possibility beneath the unkempt stubble of my ever-hopeful toes.