Ghana's MP and Deputy Minister of Finance Stephen Amoah left the country's Parliament in stitches after he used an unfamiliar English word while addressing the House.
In a video that has surfaced on social media, Amoah was addressing the House, when he said "they do not have to do things in floccinaucinihilipilification".
"I think we don't have to bring in everything that will make our exercise be in floccinaucinihilipilification. I don't think that is appropriate," Amoah said.
This elicited a mass reaction among the MPs forcing Amoha to halt his speech.
An MP rose up on a point of order to complain, seemingly in jest, about the use of the word saying they could not understand what it meant.
This prompted the speaker to ask the MP to repeat the word and explain what it meant.
"The meaning of the word is exercises conducted without any fruits. Worthless exercises... And the word is floccinaucinihilipilification," he explained.
The house yet again broke into laughter with the speaker casting doubt whether indeed it was an English word.
"I am tempted to believe this is a construct of your language, not English language," the Speaker said.
Amoah however defends himself saying the word is found in the Oxford dictionary.
He went on to spell the word.
The word is found in the Oxford Dictionary, meaning "the action or habit of estimating something as worthless."
It is a borrowing from Latin, combined with an English element.
In Latin floccī, naucī, nihilī, pilī words signifying ‘at a small price’ or ‘at nothing’ enumerated in a well-known rule of the Eton Latin Grammar + ‑fication suffix.
According to Oxford, the word floccinaucinihilipilification typically occurs fewer than 0.01 times per million words in modern written English.
