Holopher´nes

( 4 syl. ). a pedantic schoolmaster, who speaks like a dictionary. The character is meant for John Florio, a teacher of Italian in London, who published, in 1598, a dictionary called A World of Words . He provoked the retort by condemning wholesale the English dramas, which, he said, were “neither right comedies nor right tragedies, but perverted histories without decorum.” The following sentence is a specimen of the style in which Shakespeare caricatured his style: The deer was...in sanguis (blood), ripe as a pome water who now hangeth like a jewel in the ear of cœlo (the sky, the welkin, the heaven); and anon falleth like a crab on the face of terra (the soil, the land, the earth).—Shakespeare, Love’s Labor’s Lost , act iv. sc. 2 (1594). ⁂ Holophernes is an imperfect anagram of “Joh´nes Florio,” the first and last letters being omitted, F=ph.