Urquhart on Baroque Avarice

Background and Context

Urquhart wrote Ekskybalauron in 1652 while, by most accounts, a prisoner in the Tower of London following his capture at the Battle of Worcester (September 1651) — the rout that ended Charles II's attempt to retake the throne by force. Held amid the collapse of the Royalist cause, and with his family's Cromarty estate already mortgaged into near-ruin, Urquhart used the enforced idleness to write in defense of Scotland's battered reputation. The "quomodocunquizing clusterfists" passage sits inside that larger vindication: rather than deny that some London-based Scots had behaved rapaciously, Urquhart isolates them as an unrepresentative "knot," turning maximal verbal violence on the few to protect the honor of the many.

Interpretation

At the center of the passage is a compact double insult, built from two terms that divide the labor between method and embodiment. "Quomodocunquizing" is Urquhart's own coinage, from the Latin quōmodocumque — "in whatever way whatsoever" — and it names not greed as feeling but greed as procedure: a willingness to acquire money by any means, indifferent to method. "Clusterfists," by contrast, is anatomical rather than abstract. The Oxford English Dictionary glosses it as a "close-fisted" or grasping man, and the image is precise — fingers curled permanently around what they've taken, a hand shaped by habit into a fist that no longer opens. Where the first word diagnoses a system, the second freezes that system into a body.

The pairing does rhetorical work no single insult could. "Greedy" describes a disposition; "quomodocunquizing clusterfists" describes a disposition that has hardened into a practice and then into a physiology. The syntax underlines this — the noun phrase functions almost like a species name, as though Urquhart is cataloging a variety of person rather than merely accusing one. That taxonomic register is itself part of the joke and part of the argument: mock-Latin elevates the offense to the dignity of a scientific classification, and then "clusterfists" collapses that dignity with a blunt, native-sounding compound. The rhythm of the clause — Latinate windup, English gut-punch — recurs across Urquhart's prose and is arguably his signature move: erudition weaponized, then discharged at street level.

It matters, too, what the sentence is doing structurally within the larger passage. Urquhart is not indicting Scots as a nation; he explicitly isolates "a knot of Scotish bankers, collybists, or coinecoursers" — a small, named professional cluster — and blames their conduct for tarring "all their compatriots" by association. The invective therefore does double duty: condemning specific individuals, and defending everyone else from the generalization those individuals invite. Reading "quomodocunquizing clusterfists" only as an insult about money misses that it is also an argument about the unfairness of stereotype — the moral charge is displaced onto a specific, culpable "knot" precisely so it need not fall on the group. Whether the maneuver succeeds — whether naming villains this vividly actually stops a reader from generalizing, or instead reinforces the association by giving it such memorable language — is a live question the passage does not fully resolve, and it returns below.

Finally, the phrase rewards attention as craft. Urquhart is best known today as the translator whose English rendering of Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel is, if anything, more extravagant than the French original — proof his appetite for lexical invention was not confined to insult. The same appetite is visible here in miniature: two words, one built from scratch and one repurposed from folk speech, fused into a phrase that still reads as freshly cruel roughly 375 years later. Insult, in Urquhart's hands, is a made thing, engineered for durability rather than merely discharged in anger.

Current Relevance

The phrase persists because it isolates something contemporary moral vocabulary tends to blur: the difference between greed as a feeling and greed as an operating procedure. "Greedy" is a character judgment; "quomodocunquizing" names a method — acquisition indifferent to means — and that distinction maps cleanly onto modern critiques of predatory finance: private-equity roll-ups structured to extract value before a bankruptcy, rent-seeking schemes engineered to stay just inside the law, or fee architectures designed so a client cannot easily calculate what they are actually paying. In each case the objection is not simply that someone wants money — everyone does — but that the method itself has been optimized to bypass restraint, exactly the sense Urquhart's coinage captures.

"Clusterfists" keeps its charge for a related reason: it names the half of the pattern that pure greed-talk often skips — not just taking, but never releasing. Commentary on hoarded capital, wage suppression alongside record profit, or philanthropic giving calibrated to minimize rather than maximize impact is, structurally, still describing closed fists: acquisition without circulation. The phrase's continued resurfacing in word-nerd and etymology circles suggests it now functions less as a usable insult — its syllables are, deliberately, unusable in ordinary speech — than as a small conceptual tool: a compact way to name the acquire-and-hold pattern precisely, when "greedy" would flatten it.

There is a second, quieter modern relevance: the passage is a documented early appearance of the word "patriotism" itself, per Merriam-Webster's citation history. A text remembered chiefly for an insult about money is also, structurally, doing early lexical work on what love-of-country means and who gets to claim it — worth sitting with in an era when both patriotism and financial rectitude are contested, performative categories, invoked as often to shield extraction as to condemn it.

A further parallel is generational rather than financial: the phrase's whole reason for surviving is that no later English coinage has fully replaced it. "Loophole exploiter," "rent-seeker," and "grifter" each capture a piece of what Urquhart compressed into two words, but none pairs the procedural diagnosis with the bodily one in a single gesture. That gap in the modern lexicon is itself part of why "quomodocunquizing clusterfists" keeps being quoted rather than merely footnoted — it is doing descriptive work contemporary English still has no single term for.

Impact and Legacy

Urquhart's afterlife is almost entirely lexical rather than narrative — he is remembered less for what he argued than for how extravagantly he could phrase an argument. "Quomodocunquizing clusterfists" is the single most-quoted fragment of Ekskybalauron, routinely resurfaced in obscure-word features, word-of-the-day blogs, and etymology writing — it recurs, for instance, across word-nerd sites and language blogs (Michael Quinion's World Wide Words among them) and anchors an entire recurring feature on the Six Degrees of Sir Thomas Urquhart research blog, which treats Urquhart's coinages as a standing subject rather than a one-off curiosity. Its survival is a testament to craft: the phrase is quoted for its construction, not its argument.

The passage carries a second, more institutional legacy. Merriam-Webster identifies it as an early recorded use of "patriotism" in English, which means the sentence sits, somewhat by accident, in the citation apparatus of a major dictionary as well as in the informal life of an internet-era curiosity. That double life — cited by lexicographers for one word, quoted by word-nerds for a different pair of words a few lines later — has kept Ekskybalauron circulating in reference contexts long after its original polemical purpose, defending Scotland's honor after Worcester, stopped mattering to anyone.

This is of a piece with Urquhart's broader reputation as a serial word-coiner: the Oxford English Dictionary credits him with the earliest citation for a scattering of terms beyond "quomodocunquizing," part of why historians of the language treat him less as a novelty and more as a genuine, if eccentric, contributor to English's word-stock — a legacy that runs in parallel to, and reinforces, his standing as Rabelais's most extravagant English translator.

Contrasting Views or Controversies

Two objections sit close to the text, and both deserve to be taken seriously rather than let the passage read as pure delight.

The first is evidentiary: pamphlet invective is not sociology. Urquhart's "knot of Scotish bankers" is a rhetorical device calibrated for maximum contempt, not a documented account of London's Scottish financial community in the 1640s–50s. Treating the passage as evidence that Scottish bankers in London were unusually rapacious would mistake a polemicist's weapon for a historian's data — a survivorship bias of quotation culture, in which only the vivid line survives and the qualifying context around it does not.

The second is more uncomfortable: the passage sits inside a long tradition of ethnicizing avarice — attaching greed to a national or religious group as though the vice were hereditary rather than circumstantial. Urquhart's stated purpose is to defend Scots from that generalization by isolating a culpable few, but the rhetorical machinery he uses — an inflammatory, quotable phrase attached to a group identified by nationality — is structurally identical to the machinery used in genuinely bigoted financial stereotyping (most infamously, antisemitic tropes about banking), whatever Urquhart's intent. A phrase this well-crafted outlives its author's caveats: modern reuses of "quomodocunquizing clusterfists" almost never carry Urquhart's "these are not all Scots" qualifier along with them. The insult survives; the disclaimer does not.

A third, smaller caution: the pleasure the phrase produces — its sound, its strangeness — can function as a kind of moral anesthetic, letting a reader enjoy the cruelty of the characterization as wordplay without registering it as cruelty at all. Enjoying "clusterfists" as craft and reckoning with what it accuses are not the same act, and the first can crowd out the second.

There is also a question of proportion worth naming directly: Urquhart's target is a small, specific, unnamed "knot" of financiers, not a named individual and not a broad public. That narrowness is part of what makes the invective defensible as satire rather than libel — but it also means the passage offers no method for verifying whether the underlying charge was even accurate for that knot, only that Urquhart believed it was and wrote as though the belief needed no further support. A reader who quotes the phrase approvingly is, in effect, taking Urquhart's word for the accusation along with his word for the wit.

Practical Application

• Individual: Reach for greed-as-procedure language instead of a flat "greedy" when describing predatory behavior — naming the method (fee structures, loophole exploitation, asset-stripping) rather than just the disposition sharpens both the analysis and any complaint that follows, and makes the complaint harder to dismiss as mere name-calling.
• Organizational / compliance: Use the two-part diagnostic embedded in the phrase — how does this scheme acquire (the quomodocunquizing question) and how does it release, if ever (the clusterfist question) — as an informal ethics-review heuristic for a business practice, compensation structure, or fee model.
• Civic / journalistic: When writing about predatory finance or extraction schemes, borrow Urquhart's discipline of naming the culpable few precisely rather than generalizing to a nationality, religion, profession, or class — the passage is as useful as a cautionary example of the failure mode (see Contrasting Views) as it is a model of vivid critique.
• Rhetorical / writerly: As a technique for invective, the passage models a repeatable pattern — name the vice as a process, render it as anatomy, then let sound do the final work (Latinate weight followed by blunt native English) — usable for anyone crafting precise criticism rather than generic insult.
• Educational: As a teaching example in etymology or rhetoric, the phrase demonstrates coinage-by-need — a word invented because no existing word was precise enough — alongside the risk that a brilliantly made phrase can outlive and obscure its own qualifying context.
• Editorial / self-audit: Before reusing a vivid historical insult in new writing, apply the proportion check raised in Contrasting Views — is the target as narrow and specific as Urquhart's "knot," or has the phrase been pointed at a group broader than the original charge ever supported. Carrying the qualifier along with the insult, not just the insult alone, is what keeps the reuse honest.

Background on the Author

Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty (1611–1660) was a Scottish laird, soldier, and writer best known today as the translator whose English rendering of Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel out-extravagances its French original. Educated at King's College, Aberdeen, and later a traveler across Europe, he inherited a debt-burdened estate as a young man and spent much of his life trying, unsuccessfully, to restore its finances while pursuing an intellectual career far wider than the one he is remembered for — his first published work, The Trissotetras (1645), was an attempt to reform trigonometrical notation, evidence of a mind drawn as much to systems and invented terminology as to satire. He fought for the Royalist cause and was captured at the Battle of Worcester in September 1651, the engagement that ended Charles II's attempt to reclaim the throne by force; Urquhart was imprisoned, by most accounts in the Tower of London, and it was during this captivity that he wrote Ekskybalauron and its companion piece Logopandecteision, a scheme for a universal philosophical language. His family's Cromarty estate was, by this point, mortgaged into near-ruin by generations of debt — a detail that sharpens a passage denouncing financial rapacity: Urquhart wrote about "clusterfists" while himself financially undone, not from a position of comfortable distance, and much of his later writing carries the specific urgency of a man petitioning for the return of confiscated, encumbered land. He died in 1660, according to a widely repeated but unverifiable anecdote, in a fit of laughter upon hearing that Charles II had been restored to the throne — a detail that, true or not, fits the extravagant persona his own prose constructs.