Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Just took possession of Buckley: The Right Word, which is modestly subtitled "The complete book of the uses and abuses of the English language by the contemporary master of vocabulary". William F. Buckley is with us no more, alas, but his political and literary legacies live on. Rainy Day is an inveterate back-to-front reader and our peculiarity is rewarded here because The Right Word concludes with a 100-page "lexicon" of words and phrases used over the years by Buckley and illustrated with examples from his published works. A few examples:

irredentism (noun) A claim by a nation to land that formerly belonged to it
A few miles to the west, the disorder and killings go on in Ulster and Ireland, over the dogged question of self-rule: Ulster wants to hold on to its independence as part of Great Britain, substantial elements within Ireland want irredentism.

perspicuous (adjective) Analytically or visually acute
Up until a few years ago, Paris did not permit anyone to publish or to sell the works of the Marquis de Sade. Simone de Beauvoir wrote a book on de Sade in which she stressed the historical and perspicuous passages in de Sade, to which the appropriate comment is "Aha."

satyriasis (noun) Abnormal or uncontrollable desire by a man for sexual intercourse
But Henry VIII enters the history books as an effective monarch, never mind his satyriasis, and his inclination to dispose of unsatisfactory wives on the scaffold.

And to end for now, a majestic torrent of terms that would thrill any verbomanic:

stultifying (adjective) Rendering useless or ineffectual; causing to appear stupid, inconsistent, or ridiculous
The relative independence of adjacent Yugoslavia and the relative geographical isolation from Bulgaria argued the military plausibility and the geopolitical excitement of a genuine Western salient in the cold war, instead of the tiresome, enervating, stultifying countersalients to which the West had become accustomed.

William F. Buckley was a man of the right word at the right time. Droll and erudite, he was. Inimitable and indefatigable, too. We miss him greatly.