FLAVICOMOUS/ˈfleɪvɪkəməs/
Having yellow hair.
In 1937, Warwick Deeping published a book entitled Malice of Men, which included: “My mother was provoked, not only by Mrs. Braithwaite’s crowding competition, but by the lady’s person, for she was flowery and flavicomous.” This led to a gentle rebuke in Time magazine on 7 July that year in a review of another of his books, Blind Man’s Year: “When Warwick Deeping is writing in his own person, he likes to use such stiff-legged literarities as ‘flavicomous, ecology, otiose,’ [and] speaks of people ‘occluding’ the doorway. But his wistful better nature comes to the fore in his characters’ speeches, which are always from the heart.”
Only a few writers have used this word, among them Anthony Burgess, the remainder preferring a more straightforward alternative such as blonde. Back in the late nineteenth century, William Cowper Brann was struck by an article in a Boston newspaper and wrote this squib in his own paper, the Iconoclast of Waco, Texas:
Melanocomous, multiloquous, sanguinaceous, flavicomous, etc., are words that do very well for the penetralia of Boston, but should be sawed up and fed to Texas on the monthly installment plan.
[Multiloquous = talking a lot; sanguinaceous = resembling blood; penetralia = secret or hidden places.]
If you are melanocomous, you have black hair. It and flavicomous (and also auricomous, also meaning having yellow hair, which has as its starting point the Latin word for gold) derive their endings from Latin coma, hair. The first part of flavicomous is from Latin flavus, yellow.
SHARE THIS ARTICLE
