Bloomsbury, 2014. — 145 p.The book is a compendium of neologisms by a master of the craft, who informs and entertains with stories and anecdotes about the genesis of English words and phrases.
In the introduction we learn that John Milton coined the most new words in the English language, with Geoffrey Chaucer, Ben Jonson, John Donne, Sir Thomas Moore and Shakespeare not far behind. Milton is credited with 630 neologisms from ensanguined, emblazonry and horrent to the more commonly used today,earthshaking, lovelorn, fragrance, by hook or crook and all hell broke loose, as well as my favorite - pandemonium. Chaucer’s immense contribution of thousands of written words, with many originals, gave us bagpipe and universe, while Moore contributed anticipate and fact as examples. Ben Johnson invented 558 words and John Donne minted
342. Shakespeare’s body of literature consisted of 17,245 words and many phrases that were coined or popularized by him, but only about 229 to less than 500 original words could be truly attributed to him. The Bard is given credit for many first use of words and phrases. A small section in the back of the book is where the Bard’s contributions are analyzed.
In contrast, Mark Twain, took credit for no word the he coined but popularized the phraseology of the Mississippi river and gold rush/ mines (hardpan, strike it rich).
Chapters of the book are sequenced according to the alphabet. Words beginning with A (Aptronym, anecdotage, angry young man) are explained and attributed to their popularizers. Chapter B (Bacronym etc.), C (Catch-22 etc.) and so on follow the same pattern all the way to W (workaholic etc.), X, Y and Z (yahoo, zombification etc.). Also included are nonce words (Eg: Abricotine) - words made up for a specific, usually one time use in literature; the Oxford English Dictionary contains 4419 nonce words.
