Tortiloquy: crooked talk, crooked speech
Tortiloquy is a weird word. The only surviving record of this being a word anywhere ever (that I’ve found at least) is from a single book, Thomas Blount’s Glossographia.
Thomas Blount was a lexicographer(someone who writes dictionaries) in the seventeenth century. In 1656, he published his book, Glossographia, in which he covered some eleven thousand strange and rarely used English words. One of these words is tortiloquy.
Blount says that this comes from Latin Tortiloquium. However, this does not appear to be a real Latin word in any dictionary. But, it could indeed come from the Latin words tortilis, meaning “twisted” or “crooked”, and loqui, meaning “to speak”.
My best guess though is that he more or less made this word up all on his own because I can’t for the life of me find “tortiloquy” or tortiloquium referenced anywhere else ever aside from Thomas Blount’s dictionary.
“The politician denied all accusations of tortiloquy earlier in his career”.
“The crude mobster spoke nothing but tortiloquy”.