by Alex Horne
Honk: Originally the noise of a goose but recently a most deliberate and successful neologism created by Mr Roman, a nightclub owner with a degree in linguistics, not long after the turn of the millennium.
Hoodlum: In his 1877 Dictionary of Americanisms, John Bartlett says that this great word was born when a newspaper writer wrote a story about a San Franciscan gang leader called Muldoon. Wanting obliquely to name and mock the rogue in question, the journalist decided to spell it backwards as ‘Noodlum’, which you’ve got to admit is pretty funny. Fearing this was too close for comfort, his editor changed the ‘N’ to an ‘H’ and the ‘hoodlum’ was born. Unfortunately this is merely an ingenious explanation created in retrospect. The word ‘hoodlum’ had been knocking around California in the 1870s but so were an awful lot of German immigrants, who used their charming Bavarian term huddellump to mean ‘a slovenly person’ and almost certainly created ‘hoodlum’ in the process. In case you’re wondering, our ‘hoodies’ didn’t come from ‘hoodlums’ either, but were first used in print by the Irish novelist Roddy Doyle.
Hot Dog: An American cartoonist called T. A. ‘Tad’ Dorgan sketched a dachshund in a long bread roll at the close of the nineteenth century and is now often credited with inventing the word ‘hot dog’ all by himself (no such cartoon has ever actually been found, and the phrase ‘hot dog’ was used for a good decade before this story is set, but let’s not get too bogged down in pesky details). By this unusual method Dorgan also came up with ‘cat’s pyjamas’, ‘yes man’ and ‘yes, we have no bananas’, while his colleague, Billy De Beck from Chicago, gave the world ‘heebie-jeebies’ in similar style via a cartoon dialogue penned in 1923.
Intensify: While William Wordsworth coined ‘pedestrian’ in 1791, many years before the popularisation of cars necessitated such a word, and Lord Byron contributed ‘blasé’ to the language, fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge came up with ‘to intensify’ as well as ‘pessimism’. In fact, I learned from Henry Hitchings’s Dr Johnson’s Dictionary that, despite criticising Johnson’s dictionary in Biographia Literaria, Coleridge did purposefully check the book to see if it included his newly minted verb. My desire to get a word in the book is by no means unprecedented, even by Romantic poets.
International: The word ‘international’ was coined by the jurist Jeremy Bentham in the phrase ‘international law’. He was also the first to use ‘maximise’, ‘minimise’, ‘secretarial’, ‘exhaustive’, and the modern sense of ‘agenda’. Despite the success of ‘international’ (England football matches are now called ‘internationals’ rather than ‘games’, although the latter is often an apt adjective for the occasions), Bentham ‘apologised for its inelegance’, according to Bill Bryson. I therefore feel I too ought to apologise for the inelegance of ‘honk’, ‘pratdigger’ and ‘tkday’. Sorry for their inelegance. I just hope they get even half the acclaim of ‘international’.
Jack Robinson: A Tower of London executioner by this name who cut off people’s heads between 1660 and 1679 was so swift with his axe that people today still compare themselves to him when they do things quickly.
Jazz: At the turn of the twentieth century a ragtime drummer called Charles ‘Chaz’ Washington lent his name to a whole genre of music. The leader of his band in Vicksburg, Mississippi, repeatedly shouted, ‘Now Chaz! Now Chaz!’ to liven up the tempo; both the cry and the rhythm caught on and, a few months later, ‘jazz’ was born. Even I recognise this as one of the least convincing of all the personal histories in this book, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth passing on.
Literary: One of the most remarkable word coiners in history was an eccentric doctor, amateur scientist and collector, quite possibly a pratdigger (in the most positive sense), called Sir Thomas Browne. He lived in Norwich in the seventeenth century and, for perhaps the first time in history, considered himself to be a neologist. He might just have been the first deliberate Verbal Gardener. For Browne concentrated on the very act of coining words, with his many other interests merely aiding that cause. He was successful too, with ‘literary’, ‘suicide’, ‘medical’, ‘precarious’, ‘amphibious’, ‘computer’ and ‘electricity’ among his inventions (although the last two with slightly different meanings to our electricity and computers today as they weren’t invented until the end of the next century and the twentieth century respectively). That’s an impressive roster, made possible by Samuel Johnson who greatly admired the Norfolk knight, wrote a biography about him and quoted him two thousand times in his great dictionary, all but three times from Browne’s ridiculously broad compendium of knowledge called Pseudodoxia Epidemica which is still available for free on the internet.
Look Something Up: In 1692 an antiquarian called Anthony Wood was the first to write the phrase ‘to look something up’, demonstrating how interested people were then becoming both in the meanings of words and in the ways they might be recorded. It seems ludicrous now that somebody could make up so commonplace a phrase, but someone had to say it first. Earlier in the same century a Flemish chemist called Jan Baptist Van Helmont claimed to invent the word ‘gas’, inspired by the Greek term chaos. It may not sound entirely believable but until I find compelling evidence to the contrary I’m happy to take his word for it.
Maverick: A Texan called Samuel Augustus Maverick made his name thinking outside the box but inside the law in the mid-nineteenth century. Blighted by rustlers, his fellow cattle ranchers had taken to branding their animals to protect them from theft. Samuel thought the practice cruel and refused to singe his own cattle. Being the sole individual not to toe the line, he rightly reasoned that because they were the only cows without branding, his would be as recognisable and so as safe as any others. By the time he died in 1870 this lateral thinking (a phrase coined by Dr Edward de Bono in his 1967 book The Use of Lateral Thinking) was so well known that anybody with an independent mind was called a maverick in his honour.
McJob: McJob is a rare example of a word an individual is trying to remove from the dictionary. The latest edition of the Merriam-Webster defines the word, coined by Douglas Coupland in his 1991 novel Generation X, as ‘low-paying and dead-end work’, but the company’s superbly unaptonymic CEO Jim Cantalupo says that’s an ‘inaccurate description’ which should be changed. I think he should be more grateful.
Mental Safari: These distinct words were officially united by the theatrical director Mr Bodoni, who still lives on a farm in Stratford-upon-Avon, just yards (quite a few yards) from Shakespeare’s old home.
Modesty: While others were trying to protect English from any foreign influences in the late 1600s, diplomat and scholar Sir Thomas Elyot used Greek and Latin to create novel sounding words in inventions like ‘encyclopaedia’, ‘entertainment’, ‘animate’ and ‘modesty’.
Moolah: Crime writer (and circus expert) Courtney Ryley Cooper conjured up his own honk with ‘moolah’ in the 1939 book Designs in Scarlet.
Moron: In 1910 H. H. Goddard, pioneer of the IQ test, coined ‘moron’ (from the Greek for ‘dull’ or ‘stupid’) to refer to people with an IQ between 51 and 70. He also employed ‘imbecile’ for those scoring between 26 and 50 and ‘idiot’ for 0 to 25. But a ‘moron’ was his own creation, a scientific term to describe any person with a mental age between eight and twelve who, according to Goddard, was unfit for society and should therefore be either institutionalised, sterilised, or both.
Optimism: Enlightenment thinker François-Marie Arouet (1694– 1778) created the word ‘optimism’ in Candide. He also created his far better-known pen-name, Voltaire, as an anagram of ‘Arovet Li’, the Latinised spelling of his surname, and the initial letters of ‘le jeune’, meaning ‘the younger’. That’s my sort of Enlightenment thinker.
Pacific: The world’s largest ocean was granted its peaceful title by the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan in 1520.
Paddles: The new slang alternative to ‘hands’ was created deliberately by someone calling himself The Farmer in 2007, although his namesa
ke, the pre-war slang-collector John S. Farmer, does note far earlier usage alongside the noun and verb ‘daddle’.
Palindrome: Renaissance dramatist Ben Jonson may have failed with the words ‘obstupefact’ and ‘ventositous’ but he did come up with ‘damp’, ‘clumsy’, ‘defunct’ and ‘strenuous’ during the early 1700s whilst also using ‘palindrome’ for the first time in print.
Panic: Credit for this word must go to the sneaky countryside-dwelling Greek god called Pan (who had the legs and horns of a goat), who specialised in making mysterious sounds that freaked out both humans and animals and therefore created ‘panic’. ‘Pan-pipes’ are also named in his honour, presumably because they are also terrifying. The noun ‘pandemonium’ was created by John Milton in Paradise Lost, where he was also the first to ‘add fuel to the fire’.
Ping-Pong: An unlikely success story, featuring a slang name for a minority sport which games fans (‘games’ as in ‘sports’) George, Charles and Edward Parker thought up in the first decade of the twentieth century and which has since turned into a verb despite its preposterous appearance.
Pratdigger: A fine example of criminal slang, this Victorian term (originally meaning ‘pickpocket’) was dragged into the 21st century by the journalist Mr Rockwell, who also started using it in a more social sense. There are rumours that Kanye West’s 2005 hit song ‘Gold Digger’ was originally titled ‘Prat Digger’, but these are as yet unconfirmed.
Real McCoy: According to Melvyn Bragg and Bill Bryson, Joseph McCoy was a cattle rancher, like Samuel A. Maverick, whose innovations had long-lasting linguistic effects. Rather than selling his beef locally, he had the bright idea of driving his cattle hundreds of miles to a railhead in Kansas whence they were trundled off to bigger city markets and sold. Bragg writes that in the late 1860s McCoy became ‘so rich that some of his innumerable imitators tried to pretend they were the great man himself. McCoy developed the habit of introducing himself to strangers as “the real McCoy”’ (this story may not be the genuine article itself, however. Jonathan Green highlights claims from Indiana where the boxer Norman Selby’s nickname ‘Kid McCoy’ became a byword for ‘the real deal’ after he’d been forced to fend off various wannabe assailants; and from Scotland, where two rival chieftains both claimed to be in charge of the McKay clan in the 1880s. Other wordwatchers point to some particularly authentic opiates from Macao. Feel free to take your pick).
Sandwich: John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich who strutted his stuff in the seventeenth century, didn’t invent the bread-filling-bread combination but really liked the idea because it meant he could play cribbage whilst eating without his cards getting greasy. That was enough for the handy foodstuff to share in his title, and the unlikely looking word took off, soon developing into a verb as well as a noun.
Saxophone: A Belgian called Adolphe Sax displayed his brand-new musical instrument, the ‘saxophone’ at the Great Exhibition of 1851. An American composer called John Phillip Sousa also copied Pan’s trick with the ‘sousaphone’ in the 1890s (I have tried to design my own ‘hornophone’ but the name sounds rather tautological so may not catch on).
Scientist: The word ‘scientist’ was coined by a polymath called William Whewell, a philosopher, theologian, science historian, Anglican priest and indeed scientist whom the OED quotes an impressive 607 times. Previously known as ‘natural philosophers’ or, and this one’s more menacing, ‘men of science’, Whewell invented his own job in the 1840 romp, Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences Founded upon their History, in which he wrote, ‘We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a Scientist.’ And so, now, do we. He also fathered the lesser known ‘consilience’, ‘catastrophism’ and ‘uniformitrarianism‘, the better known ‘physicist’, and suggested the terms ‘anode’ and ‘cathode’ to Michael Faraday, before falling off his horse and dying in 1866, aged seventy-one.
Serendipitous: The noun ‘serendipity’ and its adjective were fashioned by the London-based antiquarian and novelist Horace Walpole (1717–97) in honour of Sri Lanka (‘Serendip’ in Persian). As well as winning a place in the dictionary, ‘serendipity’ was voted one of the ten hardest words to translate by a British translation company in June 2004. The less pleasing ‘plenipotentiary’ came top, with the Tshiluba (a language spoken in the Democratic Republic of Congo) word ‘ilunga’ winning the coveted award for non-English word most hard to pin down (meaning, roughly, a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time).
Sideburns: In 1863 an otherwise overlooked American soldier called Ambrose Everett Burnside added ‘sideburns’ to the vocabulary simply by not shaving the bit of the beard that ran parallel to his ears.
Silly Billy: The first ‘silly Billy’ was William Frederick, Duke of Gloucester, the uncle of King George III and renowned idiot in court.
Sisyphean: Although less known than Tantalus’ ‘tantalise’, ‘sisyphean’ is an adjective meaning an activity that is never-ending, usually with undertones of pointlessness, created in memory of Sisyphus, the mythological king of Corinth who was condemned to roll a large stone up a hill in the underworld. So large was the stone that it constantly fell back onto him. So frustrating was this that it spawned a new word. Verbal Gardening often feels sisyphean.
Steal One’s Thunder: Typifying the Classical influence on English in the early 1700s, the playwright John Dennis set the third of his tragedies, Appius and Virginia, in Ancient Rome. It told the true story of Appius Claudius Crassus, one of the Roman Republic’s Ten Rare Men (decemvirate) in 451 BC, and a girl he fancied called Virginia, who both ended up being stabbed to death. As well as writing the play, Dennis put himself in charge of certain aspects of its production, including creating the sound effect of thunder, either by rattling a sheet of tin or by rolling metal balls around a wooden bowl. Despite possessing what I certainly consider to be these key elements of quality drama, the play closed due to lack of audience demand soon after a performance at the Drury Lane Theatre at the start of the eighteenth century. Dennis was not happy. But he grew even less happy when he attended a production of Macbeth in the same theatre soon after and heard someone else making the noise of thunder. He couldn’t believe it. ‘Damn them!’ he cried. ‘They will not let my play run, but they steal my thunder!’ That’s right, John, but at least you’ve managed to coin your own phrase.
Sweet FA: A young girl called Fanny Adams was out playing with her sister Lizzie and friend Minnie in Alton, Hampshire, on 24 August 1868, when a stranger approached and offered her a halfpenny to walk with him before murdering, mutilating and dismembering her body. Five thousand people came to Winchester on Christmas Eve to watch her murderer, Frederick Baker, being hanged. The rest of the country welcomed ‘Sweet Fanny Adams’ into the language.
Talent: The poet Thomas Hoccleve (or Occleve as he’s also known, presumably by cockneys) was a contemporary of Chaucer, and the man who kindly donated the word ‘slut’ to the language. Born in 1369, died in 1426, and virtually unknown today, he was also the first to use the word ‘talent’ to mean ‘special ability’, so I’m very happy to do my bit to remind people of his existence.
Tantalising: For the verb ‘to tantalise’, we have to thank a naughty Greek king (one of the many sons of Zeus) called Tantalus, who was punished in the afterlife for being such a naughty king by being forced to stand in a river with the water up to his chin, directly beneath some pesky fruit-laden branches that moved away (annoyingly, I’d imagine) whenever he tried to grab something to eat.
Tarmac: John Loudon McAdam pioneered a new highway surface in 1820 which was then combined with tar a few decades later and thus lives on in the word ‘tarmac’, although I imagine John himself would have been a little annoyed that only the Mc bit of his name survives in the term. ‘Mc’ and ‘mac’, of course, mean ‘son of’, something not peculiar only to Mr McAdam. The same could be said for Scottish inventor Charle
s Macintosh, who at last provided some full body protection from his country’s inclement weather with his rubber coat in 1824, now often referred to simply as a ‘mac’, and radio personality Willard Scott, who performed under the moniker ‘Ronald MacDonald, the Hamburger-Happy Clown’ in the 1960s and eventually put the ‘mac’ in Big Mac.
Apple Mac are named after a type of apple, not a person, but I would like to point out that Apple Macintosh is a most pleasing anagram of Laptop Machines.
Tawdry: Another word with a name hidden within, ‘tawdry’ is a shortening of ‘St Audrey’s lace’, a necktie sold on the seventh-century saint Audrey’s day (17 October). Also known as Æthelthryth, but more often as Ethelreda because that’s pronounceable, Suffolk-based Audrey’s name supposedly gained its negative associations when, after she’d succumbed to a throat tumour, she claimed that God was punishing her because she used to like flashy necklaces. Now that’s a messy etymology.
Telegraph: The term ‘telegraph’ was coined by a Frenchman called Claude Chappe at the end of the eighteenth century to describe a semaphore system used in the French Revolution. A forgotten inventor at Princeton called Josephe Henry then invented the method of transmitting messages via wires which was in turn nicked from under his nose and patented by one Samuel Finley Breese Morse, a painter by trade, whose surname would also go down in history as a code (and grouchy Detective Chief Inspector Endeavour).
Telephone: The official name was first applied to the communication tool by Johann Phillipp Reis in Germany in 1861.
Titchy: The antonym of jumbo, ‘titchy’ is a flawless adjective with the most unlikely of origins. Harry Relph was a four-foot-six-inch music hall performer from the turn of the twentieth century whose nickname was ‘Little Tich’. He was also polydactylic (one of my favourite words, meaning to have more fingers or toes than the norm. Little Tich had six digits on both hands and both feet. Other polydactyls include Hannibal Lecter, Anne Boleyn and the West Indian cricketer Gary Sobers who personally removed his extra fingers during childhood ‘with the aid of catgut and a sharp knife’). Our ‘titchy’ comes from this man. But his ‘tich’ came from a notorious impostor named Arthur Orton who had returned from Australia in 1866 claiming to be Roger Charles Titchborn, the missing heir of an estate presumed lost at sea years before. Orton was found out and gained infamy as ‘The Titchborn Claimant’. So when I was a kid I called my brother ‘titchy’ because the diminutive Relph looked like Orton, who had pretended to be a man called Roger Charles Titchborn who was, in fact, just under six foot tall.