From Samuel Butler’s Hudibras. Sub out the now dowdy Greek and Latin for some ever-novel cross-disciplinary scrapings and the description still flies for academia today.
(This is the 17th century poet, not the 19th century author famous for The Way of All Flesh and infamous for The Authoress of the Odyssey.)
His ordinary rate of speech
In loftiness of sound was rich;
A Babylonish dialect,
Which learned pedants much affect.
It was a parti-colour’d dress 95
Of patch’d and pie-bald languages;
‘Twas English cut on Greek and Latin,
Like fustian heretofore on satin;
It had an odd promiscuous tone,
As if h’ had talk’d three parts in one; 100
Which made some think, when he did gabble,
Th’ had heard three labourers of Babel;
Or CERBERUS himself pronounce
A leash of languages at once.
This he as volubly would vent 105
As if his stock would ne’er be spent:
And truly, to support that charge,
He had supplies as vast and large;
For he cou’d coin, or counterfeit
New words, with little or no wit: 110
Words so debas’d and hard, no stone
Was hard enough to touch them on;
And when with hasty noise he spoke ’em,
The ignorant for current took ’em;
That had the orator, who once 115
Did fill his mouth with pebble stones
When he harangu’d, but known his phrase
He would have us’d no other ways.
The pebbled orator is Demosthenes, who – per Plutarch – fixed a speech impediment in this fashion.
Extracts 