Are you a MUMPSIMUS? Then you're wrong...

What's the word I'm thinking of? Today, it's... 

MUMPSIMUS [MUMP-sih-muss] (noun)

Someone who adheres to old ways that are obviously wrong

"The best of the joke is, that Johnston, who seems here to have deserted for a moment the old mumpsimus, contradicts himself in the very next page, and having laughed at ‘broken’ metaphors in one breath, attempts, in the next, to ‘reduce’ one, after a manner of surgery almost as awful as that of Warburton himself."
--T. D., "On the use of Metaphors" in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, (1825) (TWITO, page 92)

Hmm. Who might we apply this word to? I’m thinking of a certain mumpsimus from a certain political party. Maybe you are, too, even if it isn’t the same party. That’s politics.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The illustration is from the 1894 book Laughable Lyrics: A Fourth Book of Nonsense Poems, Songs, Botany, Music, etc. by Edward Lear.