Word Play with George Grant: Great words coined by great authors

NICK EICHER, HOST: Up next: George Grant with this month’s Word Play. Today, he helps us to appreciate great words invented by great authors.

GEORGE GRANT, COMMENTATOR: According to most dictionaries the word authorism is defined as “the state or condition of being an author.” But the plural, authorisms, refers to a commonplace authorial practice: making up words. Authorisms are thus neologisms—words that weren’t in the dictionary when writers first coined them, but they wound up there as a result of popular usage.

John Milton was a prolific creator of authorisms. He was responsible for more than 600 new English words. He imposed new meanings on old words like space, goose, and fragrance; he transformed verbs into nouns and nouns into verbs such as stunning, enjoyable, and irresponsible; and he invented a veritable catalog of entirely new words including pandemonium, terrific, sensuous, liturgical, debauchery, and padlock.

William Shakespeare was responsible for at least 400 authorisms including apostrophe, aerial, and auspicious; bedroom, birthplace, and bedazzled; cheap, countless, and courtship; dewdrop, domineering, and dwindle—and that is just a small sampling from A to D.

William Tyndale, the father of the English vernacular Bible, minted more than 100 authorisms. Passover, scapegoat, Jehovah, showbread, and atonement were all his creations. He also gave us stumbling-block, taskmaster, modesty, long-suffering, and peacemakers.

The Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser coined blatant in his epic The Faerie Queen. It originally described a fantastic thousand-tongued monster, but it has come to mean anything that is glaringly, patently obvious. “Utopia” was coined by the Tudor nobleman who ran afoul of Henry VIII, Sir Thomas More. He used it as the name for a fictional island in his 1516 satire describing the ideal society.

Jonathan Swift gave us both yahoo and lilliput in his fantasy novel Gulliver’s Travels. Gargantuan comes to us from the 16th century novel, The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel, by François Rabelais. Cyberspace was minted by William Gibson, in his 1982 short story “Burning Chrome” and then, he made it the center-point of his 1984 blockbuster novel Neuromancer.

Of course, not every authorism becomes a part of our common parlance. Shakespearean words like armgaunt, impeticos, pajock, and wappened never really happened. These are called nonce words or occasionalisms—words that simply have not endured past their inception.

The literary critic, Donald Gordon, created an authorism in 1930 when he described a mystery novel as, “a satisfactory whodunit.” The word gained faddish currency, so much so that at least one pundit declared it was, “already heavily overworked,” and predicted it would “soon be dumped into the taboo bin.” But the word lives on—as do hosts of other made-up authorial whodunits.

I’m George Grant.

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