The lexicographer Paul Dickson is a connoisseur of what he calls "word words" and a compiler of "book books". Both tautologies – known in the puffed-up jargon of linguistics as "contrastive focus reduplications" – have a precise meaning. The former refers to terms whose main purpose is to exhibit verbal virtuosity and playfulness, while the latter pays homage to the old-fashioned objects that used to be stored on shelves, as opposed to the tracts of text that materialise out of nowhere on electronic screens.
Dickson has previously assembled lists of word words in book books devoted to the specialised lingos of drinkers, soldiers, baseball players and American presidents. Here, his concern is words that owe their shaky authority to the authors who, as if counterfeiting money, coined them and edged them into general circulation. The tradition inevitably starts with Shakespeare, whose characters, speaking, not writing, spontaneously invent a couple of thousand neologisms, including such un-Elizabethan terms as "buzzer" and "manager", as well as the useful notion of "household words" and the perfectly useless pseudo-Latin verbal centipede "honorificabilitudinitatibus"; it concludes with JK Rowling, whose two contributions are "muggle" and "quidditch", comprehensible even to non-graduates of Hogwarts.
Surprises and revelations abound in Dickson's quirky alphabet. Since the adjective "ethnic" exists, why shouldn't a tribesman be an "eth", as Herbert Kupferberg proposed? And wasn't John Ruskin right to invent "illth" as the opposite of wealth? Words are no more than arbitrary signs for things, so there can be no logical objection to "gnurr", Alastair Reid's name for the fluff that collects in pockets or trouser cuffs. Ogden Nash neatly described Agatha Christie as a "murdermongress", and in doing so enriched the vocabulary of poets by devising a rhyme for Library of Congress.
A new word, however outlandish, announces a new idea. "Martian", for instance, was coined by Chaucer in 1395 – though the Wife of Bath uses it to refer to her own bellicose temper, not to extraterrestrials. Given the subject of Paradise Lost, it's no wonder that Milton was the first to use the adjective "satanic"; he also concocted "pandemonium" to describe the gathering place of his demons rather than the noise they make. More importantly, having looked through Galileo's telescope, Milton was the first writer to apply the neutral word "space" to the interstellar vacancy in which our Earth revolves, as he says, like a granule or an atom.
Quarks, the fundamental constituents of the neuron, began as one of the uncountable nonce words made up by James Joyce in Finnegans Wake; the physicist Murray Gell-Mann relished the sound of the meaningless word and whimsically applied it to elementary particles. Back on solid ground, it was Wordsworth, a tireless walker, who coined the noun "pedestrian" to describe his favourite exercise and to tether himself, like an animate tree, to his native turf.
In cases like this, Dickson restores a shock of novelty to words or phrases that have become shopsoiled. It's arresting, for instance, to know that Macbeth, while planning his crime, chooses a new, polysyllabic term to describe it: he calls the murder an "assassination", which catches his squeamish reluctance to think about the killing as a messy physical act. Later in the same play, Macduff speaks of his children as chickens, slaughtered in "one fell swoop" – not a cliche, because he is imagining a falcon that has lunged down to prey on them.
Everywhere in Dickson's book, dead metaphors are revivified. Freelancers who juggle different employers may be pleased to know that they ply a trade derived from a mercenary warrior in Walter Scott's chivalric romance Ivanhoe, who offers Richard the Lionheart "the services of my Free Lances". We still unthinkingly say that someone has "struck it rich", but when Mark Twain first used the phrase he was employing gold rush slang and remembering the sound of a miner's pick chipping at a rock face. The cliche that defines betrayal as being "sold down the river" regains moral weight when Dickson traces it to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, where it's the fate of Kentucky slaves bartered to plantation owners on the lower Mississippi who were notorious for their harshness.
The brand names of our electronic era are amusingly defamiliarised in Dickson's glossary. Google turns out to be a misnomer: its founders serendipitously mis-spelled "googol", a mathematical term for the digit 1 followed by a hundred zeros, and we can only be grateful for their error. Yahoo likewise wasn't meant to recall the savages in Gulliver's Travels, who toss excremental missiles at their enemies. The name began as "an acronym for 'yet another hierarchical officious oracle"'; then the nerdy students who programmed the server decided to acknowledge Swift's uncouth brutes as their true forefathers.
It's easy enough to add to the language. Late in the 19th century, responding to reports of God's demise, the biologist TH Huxley attached a negative prefix to the Greek term for knowledge and thus coined "agnostic". Dickson supplements such feats with a series of footnoted recipes, which suggest that neologisms can be whipped up in the kitchen or mixed in a cocktail shaker. Shakespeare is often said to have named the anchovy, though he only translated it from the Spanish; depriving him of credit, Dickson atones for any disappointment by explaining how to make anchovy paste. Identifying Scott Fitzgerald as the first writer to mention the daiquiri, he goes on to enumerate the Cuban potion's ingredients and advise on mixing them. As a verbivore, Dickson expects words to taste good when they're uttered and he acknowledges that they can sometimes go to the head and leave us feeling woozy. HL Mencken aptly made up the term "bibliobibuli" to describe this appetite: it refers to those who are "drunk on books".
Why, I wondered while reading Authorisms, is all this so funny and so much fun? Perhaps because it demonstrates that language is a comically implausible, absurdly unnecessary phenomenon, airy proof of the lightness of our being. Dickson delights in harmless insults, such as "malaga!" – a dire-sounding but nonsensical curse from a Dumas novel – or Ben Bradlee's gloriously learned "retromingent", which refers to insects that pee backwards; he also takes a riotous pleasure in onomatopoeic noises, such as "chortle" and "chug-a-lug", respectively coined by Lewis Carroll and the cowboy novelist Zane Grey, or "plobby", PG Wodehouse's transcription of the sound a pig makes while eating. Such words are full of sound and fury, and if they signify nothing, so much the better, because like birdsong or a dog's delighted yapping, they exist to vocalise our feelings, not to articulate thought.
