Letter to the Editor: Playing the name game
By William A. Fischel
Published on Monday, January 11, 2010
To the Editor:
As President Kim has noted in several speeches, Dartmouth will celebrate its 250th anniversary in 2019. The usual Latinized name for the 250th is “semiquincentennial,” which means half of five hundred. The problem is that people cannot get excited about this name even if they can pronounce it. Princeton and Washington University attempted to remedy this by applying an even more obscure name to their 250-year anniversaries, “bicenquinquagenary.” Perhaps they hoped that its extra complexity would make it catchy, like “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” It did not.
So I suggest a neologism, “quartomillennial,” meaning a quarter of a thousand years, for Dartmouth’s 250th year. It could also be taken to be four thousand years, but that would more likely be “quadrimillennial.” What counts for the present is that “quartomillennial” is easily pronounced, has an intuitive meaning (by analogy with quarter) and suggests a long view. It also helps that “quarto” is a traditional book-printing term, meaning a printed sheet folded into fourths. As this book-learned institution approaches its quartomillennium, the anniversary name reminds us that education and scholarship are long-term enterprises, and we should be looking forward as well as back.
William A. Fischel Professor of Economics