14. Words are Created

Often they spring seemingly from nowhere. Take

dog. For centuries the word in English was hound (or hund). Then suddenly in

the late Middle Ages, dog–—a word etymologically unrelated to any other

known word—displaced it. No one has any idea why. This sudden arising of

words happens more often than you might think. Among others without known

pedigree are jaw, jam, bad, big, gloat, fun, crease, pour, put, niblick (the golf

club), noisome, numskull, jalopy, and countless others. Blizzard suddenly

appeared in the nineteenth century in America (the earliest use is attributed to

Davy Crockett) and rowdy appeared at about the same time. Recent examples of

this phenomenon are yuppie and sound bites, which seem to have burst forth

spontaneously and spread with remarkable rapidity throughout the English-

speaking world.Other words exist in the language for hundreds of years, either as dialect words

or as mainstream words that have fallen out of use, before suddenly leaping to

prominence—again quite mysteriously.

Scrounge and seep are both of this type. They have been around for centuries

and yet neither, according to Robert Burchfield [The English Language, page

46], came into general use before 1900.

Many words are made up by writers. According to apparently careful

calculations, Shakespeare used 17,6 77 words in his writings, of which at least

one tenth had never been used before.

Imagine if every tenth word you wrote were original. It is a staggering display of

ingenuity. But then Shakespeare lived in an age when words and ideas burst

upon the world as never before or since. For a century and a half, from 1500 to

1650, English flowed with new words. Between 10,000 and 12,000 words were

coined, of which about half still exist. Not until modern times would this number

be exceeded, but even then there is no comparison. The new words of today

represent an explosion of technology—words like lunar module and myocardial

infarction—rather than of poetry and feeling. Consider the words that

Shakespeare alone gave us, barefaced, critical, leapfrog, monumental, castigate,

majestic, obscene, frugal, radiance, dwindle, countless, submerged, excellent,

fretful, gust, hint, hurry, lonely, summit, pedant, and some 1,685 others. How

would we manage without them? He might well have created even more except

that he had to bear in mind the practicalities of being instantly apprehended by

an audience. Shakespeare's vocabulary changed considerably as he aged.

Jespersen notes that there are some zoo to 300 words to be found in the early

plays that are never repeated. Many of these were provincialisms that he later

shed, but which independently made their way into the language later—among

them cranny, beautified, homicide, aggravate, and forefathers. It has also been

observed by scholars that the new terms of his younger years appeal directly to

the senses (snow-white, fragrant, brittle) while the coinages of the later years are

more often concerned with psychological considerations.

Shakespeare was at the center of this remarkable verbal outburst but not alone in

it. Ben Jonson gave us damp, defunct, clumsy, and strenuous among many other

useful terms. Isaac Newton coined centrifugal and centripetal. Sir Thomas More came up with absurdity, acceptance, exact, explain, and exaggerate. The classical

scholar Sir Thomas Elyot fathered, among others, animate, exhaust, and

modesty. Coleridge produced intensify, Jeremy Bentham produced international

(and apologized for its inelegance), Thomas Carlyle gave us decadent and

environment. George Bernard Shaw thought up superman.

Many new coinages didn't last—often for obvious reasons. Jonson's less

inspired efforts included ventositous and obstupefact.

Shakespeare gave us the useful gloomy, but failed with barky and brisky (formed

after the same pattern but somehow never catching on) and failed equally with

conflux, vastidity, and tortive. Milton found no takers for inquisiturient, while,

later still, Dickens tried to give the world vocular. The world didn't want it.

Sometimes words are made up for a specific purpose. The U.S.

Army in 1974 devised a food called funistrada as a test word during a survey of

soldiers' dietary preferences. Although no such food existed, funistrada ranked

higher in the survey than lima beans and eggplant (which seems about right to

me, at least as far as the lima beans go).

According to Mary Helen Dohan, in her absorbing book Our Own Words, the

military vehicle the tank got its name because during its secretive experimental

phase people were encouraged to think it was a storage receptacle—hence a

tank. The curiously nautical terminology for its various features—hatch, turret,

hull, deck—arises from the fact that it was developed by the British Admiralty

rather than the Army.