Some people’s requirements are, in truth, nimious.
Do you know that word, nimious? It’s not in common use, but some of you are exquisitely literate.
If you don’t know it, what does it sound or look like it means? Does it have an echo of minimum? Or inimical? Or numinous? Or ominous?
It’s not well known and not easy to guess. So even though it’s not that large a word, using it casually might seem a bit much.
Which is appropriate. Because “a bit much” is one way of defining it. Another is “excessive.” And perhaps even “way over the top.” Or, as lawyers say, “vexatious.” Here’s a nice example quote from an 1861 Scottish law book, courtesy of Wiktionary:
But instead of that, they raised this prejudicial question, and upon that ensues a litigation, the most nimious I ever saw, even on the part of a corporate body, whose annals generally abound with instances of nimious procedure.
Here’s an 1883 one from the Edinburgh Evening News courtesy of the Oxford English Dictionary:
The action was ex facie so nimious and unreasonable as to excite prejudice against it.
You may note that both of those citations are from Scotland. And indeed this word had its heyday – now well past – among the legal trade in Scotland.
But of course it came from Latin: nimius, ‘excessive, beyond measure’ – the adverbial accusative of which is nimium, ‘excessively’, which seems to my eyes to look a bit too much like minimum. And where does nimius come from? Nimis, also an adverb, also meaning ‘excessively’, from ne- ‘not’ and the Proto-Indo-European root *meh₁-. I’m tempted to say that nimis thus means ‘not meh’, but *meh₁- actually meant ‘measure’, so it means ‘beyond measure’ – in other words, ‘too much’.
Of course we have plenty of ways of expressing that already; the vocabulary of English is itself arguably nimious. But the joy of having many ways of saying the same thing is that we can set different tones and echoes. So if you want to sound as though you’re saying, in an erudite way, that someone is being an ominous ornery inimical big meanie, why not trot out this word? I don’t think it’s altogether over the top or out of hand. Unlike some people’s demands.
Sesquiotica 