Quote Originally Posted by BroFists View Post
What does "by his most puissant hands" even mean lol?
You've heard "has their hands in everything" or "has big hands" as a subtle indicator of great strength... perhaps among other things? Just work from there.

Puissant = having a lot of power or influence.

Most of the words aren't exclusive to an English major vocabulary by any means, though. They just happen to be older words and, more rarely, older structures.

Most of the time they require to be more wordy but allows greater precision in tone or reference (see... back in their days, memes may have been a thing, but they couldn't be used in outright lieu of understandable sentences), and other times they're actually quicker because the meaning of the word hadn't yet quite been tracked into such specific meanings as we now give them. It's a look back on language where you win some and lose some and it's just generally fun to play around with.