Words writers invented

When I was about fifteen, I wrote a spy thriller and coined the word ‘contortured’ – applying it to the effect on a vehicle’s tyres during a chase; combining ‘contorted’ and ‘tortured’. A good friend advised me to take it out; I had no business inventing words, the dictionary was adequate, it seemed. The point of a new word is that it should be understood by anyone coming across it.

A new book has just been published, Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers by Paul Dickson (Bloomsbury). Yes, the word ‘authorism’ is an invented word, too.  Indeed, the verb ‘to coin’ was coined by George Puttenham in 1589, when he observed that youngsters ‘seeme to coigne fine wordes out of the Latin’.

A brief list of some words created and the writers who invented them follows:

William Wordsworth – pedestrian

Alexander Dumas – feminist
John Milton – earthshaking
Dr Seuss – nerd
Ben Jonson – clumsy, damp
Thomas More – anticipate, fact
Milton – pandemonium, lovelorn
Karel Capek – robot
Raymond Chandler – unputdownable
Nabokov - nymphet
Shakespeare – bedazzle, subcontract, scuffle

Of course some of Shakespeare’s ‘invented’ words may have been around before his time, but it appears he was the first to write them down and use them in context. Milton seemed as inventive, accredited with over 600 new words.

Also mentioned are those words writers invented that didn’t catch on at all: for example, Tolkien’s ‘eucatastrophe’ and James Fenimore Cooper’s ‘Americaness’, referring to a female American.

So, Authorisms is definitely on my ‘to buy’ list.

Another book of interest is Bill Bryson’s Mother Tongue: The English Language. As he points out, ‘No other language has anything even remotely approaching it in scope.’ This book is worthy of closer inspection.

ENDURING LOVE - Raymond Chandler

It took over fifty years but on Valentine’s Day this year, author and screenwriter Raymond Chandler finally got his wish and he was reunited with his wife. I haven’t read much about this – it was in the Los Angeles Times, and I noted it in the Craig Brown column in the Daily Mail. Craig Brown is a humorous writer, often bursting pompous bubbles. This piece is both straight and quite moving.

Chandler’s wife Cissy was much older than him. She died in 1954 and he never really got over it. He wrote, ‘She was the best of my heart for thirty years, ten months and four days. She was the music heard faintly at the edge of sound.’ He died about three years later, but unfortunately his alcoholism prevented him from properly finalizing the paperwork that would ensure his last resting place was alongside his beloved Cissy.

Then in 2009 Chandler fan Loren Latker unearthed the expressed wish of Chandler to be buried with Cissy. It was a wish, and not legally binding. Loren hired Aissa Wayne, daughter of John Wayne, and after eighteen months of legalities, the Los Angeles judge gave the go-ahead for Cissy Chandler’s ashes to be moved to her husband’s grave in the San Diego cemetery.

A cortege of cars of the Philip Marlowe period, accompanied by Dixieland jazz band, made the ceremony most memorable, and actor Powers Booth, who played Marlowe, attended with other celebrities.

The shared headstone has a quotation from The Big Sleep: Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.