‘Authorisms’ by Paul Dickson Reviewed by Henry Hitchens
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From Dickens we get ‘butterfingers,’ from Lewis Carroll ‘chortle.’ Shakespeare’s word for a half-smile—’smilet’—never caught on.
In 1754, the English dilettante Horace Walpole wrote a letter to his friend Horace Mann in which he mentioned that he had recently found some curious information about heraldry in an old Venetian book. Dangling a talisman over the page, he had been drawn to the detail in question. He described this as a happy accident, “almost of that kind which I call Serendipity” and proceeded to explain to Mann what he meant by this expressive word. His inspiration was a fairy tale, “The Three Princes of Serendip,” the heroes of which were forever making chance discoveries.
The word “serendipity” did not catch on immediately. It became well-known only in the second half of the 20th century, thanks in no small part to its adoption by Walter Cannon, a Harvard physiologist, and the Columbia sociologist Robert K. Merton (who may have also coined the term “self-fulfilling prophecy”). Today “serendipity”
is one of those mellifluous dainties beloved of poetic souls and posturing journalists, and although Horace Walpole made other bequests to posterity—the Gothic novel “The Castle of Otranto” (1764) and the villa like a slice of wedding cake that he built west of London at Strawberry Hill—the delicious “serendipity” may just be his most cherished achievement.
Coinages of this kind are the subject of Paul Dickson’s “Authorisms.” Mr. Dickson is a prolific writer on words, and his latest book focuses on some of the words that have sprung from the imagination of particular writers. It is a work of reference and gentle entertainment rather than a seamless narrative; most of the entries are less than half a page long. Mr. Dickson omits Cannon and Merton from his discussion of “serendipity” and is on parlous ground when he describes the word as “wonderfully onomatopoeic”—there is little in the sound of it to suggest happy accident. But he has plenty of pleasing things to say about a host of words and phrases, from “a man got to do what he got to do” (attributed to a character in “The Grapes of Wrath”) to the noun “zombification” (apparently coined by NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu ).
Unsurprisingly, Mr. Dickson’s most-cited source is Shakespeare —”one fell swoop,” “to the manner born,” “salad days.” Also on the leaderboard, though a long way behind, are Charles Dickens (“butterfingers,” “scrooge”) and Lewis Carroll (“chortle,” “galumphing”). But determining who actually invented a word is notoriously tricky, and Mr. Dickson occasionally goes astray—though he has the gumption to issue the caveat that some of the coinages he identifies may have been “second strikes.”
He says that Shakespeare coined “eyesore,” yet more than half a century before he used the word in “The Taming of the Shrew” it appeared in a book by the lawyer John Rastell. He also presents Shakespeare as the first user of the rare and attractive noun “smilet” to denote half a smile, though it had previously been employed by the poet Abraham Fraunce, whose writings Shakespeare knew. He writes of Christopher Booker coining “neophiliac” for his 1969 volume about recent changes in English life, but sociologists had been using it since the 1940s. And Theodore Levitt didn’t coin “globalization” in a piece for the Harvard Business Review in 1983; 10 years earlier Fouad Ajami, a foreign-policy expert, was using it in what is now its current sense, and he may not have been the first to do so.
In each of these instances the authority Mr. Dickson cites was responsible for popularizing the word rather than dreaming it up. Mr. Dickson credits himself with “demonym,” a term for one of those words that define people by their geographical origins (such as Angeleno or Minneapolitan). It certainly seems to be Mr. Dickson who has made this word well-known, largely through his interesting book “Labels for Locals: What to Call People From Abilene to Zimbabwe” (1997). Yet this is one of the second strikes to which he refers. Olphar Hamst in his 1868 “Handbook of Fictitious Names” repeatedly writes of demonyms and labels the particular phenomenon with which Mr. Dickson is concerned a “geo-demonym.”
One sometimes wishes that Mr. Dickson’s curiosity extended further. He observes that the adjective “retromingent” (urinating backward) was not coined by Ben Bradlee, the former editor of the Washington Post. And indeed it wasn’t. Mr. Bradlee used it in a hostile response to the nagging attentions of his critic Reed Irvine (“You have revealed yourself as a miserable, carping, retromingent vigilante”) and later wrote: “God knows where I found ‘retromingent’ but it was the perfect word for the occasion.”
Mr. Dickson doesn’t pursue the question of where Mr. Bradlee might have stumbled up on the term. In truth, it is a little less obscure that either of them seems to have imagined. It can be found in Samuel Johnson’s great dictionary of 1755 as well as in earlier lexicons and in the writings of Jonathan Swift and the records of the Royal Society. The Oxford English Dictionary cites as its first user Sir Thomas Browne, the 17th-century writer and polymath.
Sir Thomas must rank as one of the boldest, strangest and most dramatic users of the English language. He seems to have been the first person to employ the words “electricity,” “insecurity” and “medical.” So it’s a shame that he gets no mention from Mr. Dickson, especially as this genial book celebrates above all else the dazzling inventiveness of authors.
Mr. Hitchings is the author of “Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary” and “The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English.”
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