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The OED notes that its earliest known use is by William Shenstone (whom I have never read) in a letter from 1741, and that it derives from ‘a well-known rule of the Eton Latin Grammar’ that includes the words flocci, nauci, nihili, pili. It might have been well-known to the dictionary makers, but not to the countless websites today that discuss the word. Many transpose the phrase ‘well-known’ to apply to the Eton Latin Grammar, though there is no evidence they know anything about this either. New media: new ignorance.
The Eton grammar descended from grammars by the first master of St Paul’s School in London, William Lily (1468–1522), which he compiled in collaboration with Erasmus and John Colet. A conflated edition came out in 1549. Edward VI and Elizabeth I decreed it the only authorised grammar in the kingdom. Its main structure endured, and in 1758 a revised edition appeared as The Eton Latin Grammar.
In search of the ‘well-known rule’, I found in the London Library an edition from 1825, with a frontispiece boasting a lion and a unicorn and an ‘Advertisement’ declaring that S. Buckley and T. Longman had purchased ‘the Royal Grant and Privilege of printing Lily’. I wonder if the claim had any standing in law. In any case, the rule appeared in the section on syntax, under the heading ‘Genitivus post verbum’ (I tremble to trespass on Peter Jones’s territory). ‘Flocci, nauci, nihili, pili, assis, hujus, teruncii, his verbis, aestimo, pendo, facio, peculiariter adduntur.’ (A teruncius was, I learn, a small coin.) So those nouns in the genitive attach to the verbs named, as in Ego illum flocci pendo, ‘I consider the thing of no importance’. Another 7,999 of Mr Andrews’s words to go.
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