The best word ever invented

Readers have offered a number of comments on words since we started discussing the English usages of so there and take that and rude; some have looked in dictionaries to find the origins of indecent and fisticuff and Esperantist.  Yet there was a word that I was rather disappointed not to be asked about.  Surely no one had seen it in writing before.  I had said that repetitive use of the pronoun one tends to sound “old-fashioned or repipi.”

I had to fish for a question about it, and then Rick said (in effect) that it sounded like re-urinating.  I’d never thought of that, and I almost thought of not discussing repipi after all.

I had a friend named Luis Picó.

He was employed by Cambridge University as a lector in Spanish, a post limited to maybe a couple of years.  Most of his family had been killed in the Spanish civil war, and he was liable to convulsions of the diaphragm, that felt like “giving birth to elephants.”  Once a noise in the street caused him to fend off the panic by gabbling at high speed:

Santa Barbara bendita – que en cielo estas escrita – con papel y agua bendita – diciendo tres veces “Jesús Jesús Jesús!”

Only once did I see him fall into one of his agonies, and I tried, in vain, to stop it by hypnotizing him with a technique someone had recently shown me.

Luis had a concept of raza – not “race” in the usual sense, but a lofty quality in some people, irrespective of their class or ethnicity.  He pointed to, for instance, among a bunch of children in a street, one urchin in whom he discerned raza.

He talked and gestured extravagantly, and had a gift for words.  Little thingumabobs were chingolitos.  Croutons, bits of toast for dropping in the soup, were picatostes (that may not have been his own invention).  The stew he was cooking on the stove went clof-clof-clof.  And upper-class nobs among the students, sons of baronets and cabinet ministers, spoke in tones that were repipi.

If you’ve ever heard a self-regarding Englishman, with an expensive education and name-droppable acquaintances, utter a probably vapid opinin in shrill and dainty diction, you’ve heard repipi.

I don’t claim it’s the best of all words.  I say it’s the best ever coined out of no preceding material by an individual.  The explanation of why it seems so laughably perfect has to be somewhere – but I don’t know where – in the web of sound- and letter- and meaning-associations that cause our reactions to all words.