“Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.”

- C.S. Lewis

This wonderfully expressive word is applicable to any hypocrite endeavoring to impress upon his fellows that he is a person of great benevolence or high moral standards. It comes from a character named Seth Pecksniff, in Martin Chuzzlewit (another great name) by English novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870), who described Pecksniff as having "...affection beaming in one eye, and calculation shining out of the other." The American writer and critic H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), in The American Language, called Philadelphia "the most pecksniffian of cities." He was quite the inventor of words; for example, bibliobibulus, menaing "one who gets drunk on books" (biblio-, as in bibliophile, plus bibulous, addicted to drik): "There are some people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men who are drunk on whiskey or religion." This passage is from his Mencken Chrestomathy.

This verb is used both transitively and intransitively and is found most commonly in Scotland, but used elsewhere as well. To demit a position is to resign it, to give it up or relinquish it, and it often refers to public office. Intransitively, to demit is simply to resign. It comes from Latin demittare (to send down), based on the prefix di-, a variant of dis (away, apart) plus mittere (to send). Because of his need for "the woman I love," Edward VIII of England (1894-1972) demitted his throne in 1936 — i.e., he abdicted.

To cavil is to carp or quibble, to raise picayune, inconsequential, and usually irritating objections, to offer gratuitious criticisms, to find fault for the sake of finding fault. As a noun, a cavil is that sort of annoying trivial objection, a bit of pointless carping, that adds nothing but irritation. In Latin, cavillari means to "scoff" or "jeer," the nouns cavilla and cavillatio mean "raillery" and a cavillator is a quibbler; cavilla gratia cavillae (like ars gratia artis, as it were). In Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1 (Act III, Scene 1) there is a furious argument between Hotspur and Owen Glendower about the division of some land, and Hotspur cries:

I do not care: I'll give thrice so much land
to any well-deserving friend:
But in way of a bargain, mark ye me,
I'll cavil on the ninth part of a hair.

Note cavil on; nowadays it's cavil at or cavil about. The Irish statesman and writer Edmund Burke (1729-1797) condemned "cavilling pettifoggers and quibbling pleaders." Lawyers are known to cavil tirelessly and endlessly at the terms of an agreement.

To ballyrag or bullyrag someone is to harass or abuse him, in the more violent sense of the word, or less dramatically, to tease him. Fowler says that the derivation is unknown, and that ballyrag is the far more common and preferable form, but other dictionaries give bullyrag as the first choice. To rag someone is to tease him, in American usage, but in British usage, to do rather more than that: to persecute him with crude practical jokes, with rag also a noun denoting that kind of tormenting behavior. The bullyrag form probably has some connection with bully, embellished by rag. In any case, bally- or bullyragging is reprehensible abusive horseplay and badgering, the kind employed, for example, in the sort of fraternity hazing that is a practice now mercifully fading from the scene.

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