BTW, I don't know the adj for tapir, but tapirine is elegant.
After hearing a middle class person take physical pleasure in rolling off 'tornadic activity,' rather than the modest 'tornadoe(s),' I began to beseek other applications of this lofty and supersyllabized term. 'Termitic activity,' or 'tapiric activity' are two early nuggets!
Someone was asking why I liked Fussell's "Class" so much. Well, one reason is he alerted me to the above - the middle class's love of pretentiousness as manifest in hypersyllabification, to denote a weight that just aint there. His book is full of this stuff. Full of both things I'd never thought of and answer to many questions I had. I have never seen a book that gives better explanation to why the people I grew up around -- ordinary middle-class suburbans -- acted the way they did.
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