This is a word that says “please clap.” Or should I say, it claps for itself. It is one bowtie-wearing word. But it’s like wearing a bowtie on the beach.
No, no, that’s not even it; a bowtie on the beach would be like saying “Methinks the lady doth protest too much” or perhaps even “Methinketh thou dosteth forgetteth to whomst thou art speakinge.” It plays to the groundlings. Yclept is, hmm, maybe like serving Kool-Aid at a picnic in a Shreve, Crump & Low gurgling cod pitcher, or pouring it through an antique silver port funnel to get the sand out. Yclept is a word that on the one hand is an absolute cod, but on the other hand is a filter: the very ability to recognize that it is a real word and not a typo or keysmash bespeaks a relatively rarefied education. Yclept is not a word for people who use a pseudo-calligraphic font to signify fanciness; it is one for those who use a font that emulates the rough type sets of half a millennium ago. It says “ha, ha, look at me, I’m fancy, ha ha, no but actually I am, ha ha.”
Yclept, I will say for those who have never had it inflicted on them, means ‘called, named’, as in “The old and tenantless dwelling yclept Fieldhead,” but it’s not for street use. It is “occasionally used as an adjective or verb for humorous or archaic effect,” as Wiktionary says – or, as Oxford more repletely explains, “much affected as a literary archaism by Elizabethan and subsequent poets; in less dignified writing often used for the sake of quaintness or with serio-comic intention.” It is a word that Shakespeare used, and Milton, but only once each; it is a word Charlotte Brontë used for archaism (“yclept Fieldhead,” in Shirley), as Henry Fielding did a neat century before her (“thoſe fair River Nymphs, ycleped of old the Napææ,” in Tom Jones), and James Joyce did fourscore years after (“a young learning knight yclept Dixon,” in Ulysses). It is a word that Kurt Vonnegut definitively wiped his butt with in Bluebeard: “When I saw them, they were painted the palest rose-orange, not unlike the Sateen Dura-Luxe shade yclept ‘Maui Eventide.’”
So now, if you were (as my friend Iva Cheung suggests) to jokingly refer to A Streetcar Yclept Desire, it would get chuckles just from the same set who would be amused by a cartoon of Marlon Brando shouting “Ave, Stella!” And if you were to try to use yclept in earnest in an essay, any teacher who didn’t circle it with a red pen would probably have to take a week of sick leave after rolling their eyes too hard.
You might want to know how you’re supposed to say this word, inasmuch as you’re supposed to say it at all. It’s two syllables; you say it like “eclipse” except with “ept” in place of “ipse.” And you can – if you fancy being extra fancy – say it to rhyme with “leaped” rather than with “kept,” or even – if you want to spell it ycleped – like “ecleepid.”
You might also want to know what the yheck that y is doing there. Well, it was a kind of a fad in Middle English; past participles got it added to the front of them willy-nilly. There are various among them that are supposedly not obsolete yet, but I doubt you will see any of them, perhaps with the exception of ybounden in the song “Adam Lay Ybounden” (which you might hear during Advent – here’s a rendition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=626Nrbtwtao). And where did Middle English get the y- from? Old English ge-, which was a productive prefix for past participles. That in turn came from the same Germanic origins as the modern German prefix ge-, which is used in exactly the same way (Das habe ich gedacht). In yclept, it makes matching cufflinks with the -t, which forms clept from clepe the same way we form slept from sleep.
OK, and what is clepe? I already told you: a verb meaning ‘call, name’. But it also had other meanings – ‘call out, shout, summon, hail’ – and it comes from an old Germanic klip- stem meaning ‘make a sound, make a loud noise’, which, apparently, is another form of the klap- stem, from which we get ‘clap’.
So, as I said, yclept claps for itself. Take a bow… tie.
Sesquiotica 