New Word Order – Frank McNally on why some neologisms take off while others don’t

The word “feminist” is now 150 years old, I was surprised to learn recently. Its sesquicentennial arises from 1873, when Alexander Dumas first used it in print, and then apologised to readers who didn’t recognise it.

As translated, he wrote: “The feminists (excuse this neologism) say, with perfectly good intentions, too: all the evil rises from the fact that we will not allow that woman is the equal of man.”

The f-word’s anniversary was one of the revelations of an entertaining, second-hand book I bought somewhere called Authorisms, by Paul Dickson.

This is a compendium of “Words Wrought by Writers” (his subtitle) that, in most cases, proved so instantly useful, it’s a surprise to learn they started out as verbal flourishes or figments of an author’s imagination.

‘Worst morning of my life’ – Alison Healy on tricky tourists

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Custer’s Last Tune – Frank McNally on the dubious history of the ballad Garryowen

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Drama and spirituality – Desmond O’Neill on Rossini’s Petite messe solennelle

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Dutch gold – Frank McNally on a weekend in idyllic Amsterdam

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Dickson is American, so such classic Irish examples as Conor Cruise O’Brien’s “GUBU” do not make his list.

But this country is well represented thanks to the likes of Swift (“lilliputian”, “a modest proposal”, and “yahoo”, among others), Shaw (“snob”, “chaplinesque”, “comstockery”, etc), and Joyce (“quark”).

A subtheme of the book is why certain coinages take off and others don’t. One of the rules seems to be that you can’t deliberately make a new word popular, although many authors have tried and there are disproving exceptions.

Oscar Wilde, for example, is in Dickson’s collection for “Bunbury”: an imaginary person used as a bogus excuse for visiting a place or avoiding work.

But the only reason that makes the cut is because Wilde had one of his characters from The Importance of Being Ernest invent it. If the word was ever genuinely popular, it’s not now.

(Fictional Bunburys should not, in any case, be confused with Irish author and historian Turtle Bunbury, whom I have never met or used as an excuse, but who I am assured by many reliable sources is real.)

Quark is an interesting case in that its invention and definition were separate events. Joyce first used it as a nonsense word in Finnegans Wake: “Three quarks for Muster Mark.”

Separately and later, the physicist Murray Gell-Mann was thinking of calling certain kinds of elementary particle something that sounded like “kwork”. Then in 1963, “on one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake”, he saw Joyce’s spelling and preferred that.

It must be said that there are entries in Dickson’s list the average reader will never have seen before. Or maybe I should speak for myself. I for one had not previously encountered the adjective “retromingent”, here attributed to Ben Bradley, famous Washington Post editor of the Watergate era.

Although that scandal was named prosaically for the building in which the initial burglary happened, it also unleashed a plague of neologisms on the world that still shows no sign of abating.

Every journalistic half-wit in the decades since has felt the need to append the suffix “-gate” to whatever the latest local controversy is. Bradlee, by contrast, makes the list for a 1978 letter in which he called a long-time media critic “a miserable, carping, retromingent vigilante”.

In his later autobiography, he confessed to not knowing where he’d found his r-word. Which means, by the way, “urinating backwards”, in the manner of certain four-legged animals. Now that the insult has belatedly entered my vocabulary, however, I full intend using it whenever a suitable occasion arises.

The obvious example of an author deliberately inventing new words that nevertheless became instantly popular, even indispensable, was George Orwell, via 1984.

Big Brother, Newspeak, Double Think, and Thought Police all soon became standard English for the sinister new realities described. More recently, and a lot less ominously, JK Rowling has done something similar.

This reminds me in passing, as I was pleasantly reminded by the book, that another female writer, Agatha Christie, was once – and surely only once – described in verse as a “murdermongress”. The inevitable culprit was Ogden Nash who, in keeping with his policy of going to very great lengths for rhymes, needed something to so with “Library of Congress”.

In the tradition of GUBU, I too once tried to launch a new word acronym in the pages of this newspaper. It was during the Public Accounts Committee’s Dirt tax inquiry of 1999, when certain dubious decisions by past finance minsters were blamed on “fear of flight of capital”.

So often was this phrase used in one hearing that I proposed a new word: FOFOC. It would have saved bankers and Department of Finance officials a lot of time, I reckoned. A typical usage, whenever the Government proposed increasing tax, would be: “We can’t do that, FOFOC’s sake”. Alas, for some reason, it never took off.