10 Words Coined By Writers – 500 Words Ep. 33

If you’ve been keeping up with the HH 500 Words YouTube series, you’ll have seen a few literary lists crop up amidst all the weird words and word origins. Back in February, we marked Dickens’ birthday with a list of words derived from his characters. In April, we marked the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death with a list of words he used that no one can quite decipher. 

And this week, we’re heading back down the library with 10 Words Coined By Writers:

One word that could have made this list (and would have done, had we not already addressed it in our video on little-known opposites) is eucatastrophe, a term coined by Lord of the Rings author JRR Tolkien as the opposite of catastrophe: a sudden event of sheer good fortune in the plot of a story that typically hastens its conclusion.

The opposite of a catastrophe is a EUCATASTROPHE – a sudden, unexpected event that has wonderful consequences.

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 14 April 2015

Lewis Carroll’s chortle could have made our top 10 too, had we not already explained its origins in our video on portmanteaux. But one word that failed to make the final cut here and yet still deserves an explanation, is the story behind James Joyce’s little known contribution to particle physics: the quark.

A quark, for those of you not too well versed in this subject (a minority, surely…) is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as:

Each of a group of subatomic particles regarded, with leptons, as basic constituents of matter, and postulated never to occur in the free state but to be combined in pairs to form mesons and in triplets to form baryons, and to have fractional electric charges, +⅔ and −⅓ that of the proton.

Well, that clears that up. But without going too deeply into the science behind the likes of leptons and quarks, all that concerns us here is that quarks were first postulated by American physicist and Nobel Prize winner Murray Gell-Mann in 1964. Although originally theoretical, Gell-Mann’s model of the subatomic “particle zoo” has since been validated, and ultimately the terminology he used in his original explanation has since become the standard across all physics. But why call them quarks in the first place? Well, why not let the man himself explain. 

In 1978, Gell-Mann wrote to the editor of the OED Supplement to explain the thinking behind his word:

I employed the sound “quork” for several weeks in 1963 before noticing “quark” in Finnegans Wake, which I had perused from time to time since it appeared in 1939 ... I needed an excuse for retaining the pronunciation “quork” despite the occurrence of “Mark”, “bark”, “mark”, and so forth in Finnegans Wake. I found that excuse by supposing that one ingredient of the line “Three quarks for Muster Mark” was a cry of “Three quarts for Mister…” heard in H. C. Earwicker’s pub.

In other words, as Gell-Mann later expounded in his book, The Quark and the Jaguar (1995), he knew the sound of the word he wanted to use before he decided on how it should be spelled; at one time, he explained, quark might even have been spelled “kwork”. But then, purely by chance, he stumbled across the word quark in James Joyce’s enigmatic writing, and the Q spelling stuck. 

One question remains, however—what was James Joyce’s quark in the first place? Well, it’s presumed that the quark used in Finnegans Wake is meant to represent the sound of a seagull, and is used in the novel as a call to buy a round of drinks. Any excuse…

The longest palindrome in the Oxford English Dictionary is TATTARRATTAT, coined by James Joyce to represent the sound of
a knock on a door.

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 16 October 2015

Nerd

Not only is it World Book Day, but today HaggardHawks was also singled out by the lovely people at @TechRepublic as one of the top 10 geekiest Twitter accounts to follow, providing “a new burst of nerdery to your Twitter feed”. Truly, there is no higher honour. Especially seeing as we were listed alongside the likes of Wil Wheaton, the Mars Curiosity Rover, Neil deGrasse Tyson and the CIA. It’s like the guestlist of the strangest dinner party ever. I just hope they remember I don’t eat seafood.

But with both World Bookishness and word nerdery in mind, there was really only one thing to do—talk about Dr Seuss’s involvement in the history of the word nerd.

Nerd first appeared in print in Dr Seuss’s If I Ran The Zoo in 1950:

“It’s a pretty good zoo,”

Said young Gerald McGrew,

“And the fellow who runs it

Seems proud of it, too.”

“But if I ran the zoo,”

Said young Gerald McGrew,

“I’d make a few changes.

That’s just what I’d do…”

The poem continues—in anapaestic tetrameter, if you want to get really nerdy—listing all the fantastical creatures that “young Gerald McGrew” plans to capture and keep at his zoo. Sadly hawks don’t get a look in, but plenty of other creatures do, including “an It-Kutch, a Preep and a Proo, a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker too.” 

And there, alongside the word nerd, is a picture of a short, squat, grumpy-looking creature with a long face and straggly white hair—the original nerd.

Just for the record, HaggardHawks does not look a bit like this

And that would be that, if it weren’t for one thing: Dr Seuss’s nerd looks more cantankerous than it does—well, nerdy. And it’s this inconsistency that has stirred up considerable debate as to whether If I Ran The Zoo is the word’s genuine origin or not. 

The poem certainly provides us with the earliest written evidence we know about, but in this case that might not be the end of the story. Instead, some etymologists have suggested that nerd might come from nertz, an old 1920s slang word for “nonsense” or “madness”. Alternatively, the Oxford English Dictionary claims it could be “a euphemistic alteration of turd” (although that takes us dangerously close to poppycock territory). 

Or maybe it comes from Mortimer Snerd, a character created by the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen in the 1940s? Or maybe it was originally knurd, a university back-slang reversal of “drunk”, implying someone who doesn’t partake in drinking and partying on college campuses? (In which case nerd would be a fine example of an ananym.)

But with no hard evidence as yet to support any of these suggestions, Dr Seuss rightly remains credited with inventing the nerd. It’s just a shame that the it-kutch never caught on as well.