Praise; panegyric; commendation. Men are quite as willing to receive as to bestow encomiums.
I first learned the word "encomium" while reading a biography of Chopin. Robert Schumann’s famous quote about Chopin — "Hat’s off gentlemen, a genius!" — was described as an "encomium", a word I had to look up in a dictionary to understand. The context of the word would seem to have made its meaning clear enough, but at 14 or 15 years of age the word was new to me, and its usage seemed so deliberate that I wanted to see if it had deeper meaning.
At the time I was interested in commonly used words with unusual 5th meanings, or even unexpected primary meanings. Sitting on the couch reading the dictionary I discovered that the first definition for "magazine" did not refer to a printed periodical but to guns and weaponry. This was new to me, and it inspired me to seek out common words with obscure alternate meanings, this so that I could baffle or at least impress English teachers.
"Encomium" seems to be rarely used today. I think of it as a term used only by musicologists and biographers in reference to Robert Schumann’s comments about other composers. For this reason it rises a step above being a dictionary-only term. I probably encountered the word elsewhere when if I did I imagine I dismissed it as being borrowed from the Schumann context. Further use of that word was simply mimicry of Chopin’s biographers.
All of which seems frivolous now that I think about it. I became possessive of my initial discovery of that word, biased by illegitimate notions of the primacy of first discovery. Yet this is how memory works. Any context in which "encomium" appears has become associated with Robert Schumann, or Fréderic Chopin, no matter where the word appears.
