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

10 Portmanteau Words

If you follow the HaggardHawks Twitter feed, you might have spotted the word insinuendo the other day, meaning “an insinuated remark”. According to the late Oxford English Dictionary editor Robert Burchfield, insinuendo is a “tasteless word.” Well, there’s no accounting for taste, of course, but as well as being “tasteless”, insinuendo is also a portmanteau—a blended word that brings together two existing words to form a new one. 

And it’s 10 of those we’re looking at in this week’s YouTube video.

As mentioned in the video, the term portmanteau was first used to describe “blended” words like these by Lewis Carroll, who took the name of a type of suitcase with two separate compartments, and applied it to terms in which “there are two meanings packed up into one word”.

Although Carroll was writing in 1871, it’s tempting to think of portmanteau words as a much more modern phenomenon. It’s certainly true that “blending” words together to form (albeit often fairly clumsy) new ones is still a very fruitful word-forming process today—you can take your pick from any number of recent examples, like fandom, bromance, mocktail, cosplay, metrosexual, guyliner, Brangelina, Twitterati, edutainment, frappuccino, snowmaggedon, favicon, chillax, rockumentary and mockumentary.

But despite their modern appearances, a lot of portmanteau are much older than they first appear—even insinuendo dates back to 1885.

Take a word like newscast, for example. Despite it’s relatively modern feel, its earliest appearance in the language dates from 1928, when it cropped up in an edition of Time magazine. The first motorcade drove through Rockford, Illinois, back in 1910. People have been eating with sporks since 1909, and enjoying brunch for even longer—it’s earliest record comes from an 1896 edition of the satirical magazine Punch that called it “an excellent portmanteau word … indicating a combined breakfast and lunch”. Unfortunately, another word the magazine tried to champion didn’t catch on:

At Oxford, however, two years ago, an important distinction was drawn. The combination-meal, when nearer the usual breakfast hour, is ‘brunch’, and when nearer luncheon, is ‘blunch’.

Another early portmanteau—which sadly didn’t make the final cut in our video—is gerrymander. (Shameless plug #495: there’s more on this in the HH factbook, Word Drops—which is now out in the USA!)

Gerrymander derives from the name of American politician and diplomat Elbridge Gerry. Gerry was serving as a Governor of Massachusetts when in 1812 he signed a bill that redrew the boundaries of Massachusetts’ state senate electoral districts so that they would most benefit his Democratic-Republican Party. This practice was certainly nothing new (the Anti-Federalist leader Patrick Henry had tried the same trick in Virginia back in 1788), but it nevertheless soon became known as gerrymandering—a combination Gerry’s surname and the word salamander.

Why a salamander? Well, an article in the Boston Globe on 26 March 1812 happened to liken the shape of one of Gerry’s redrawn districts to that of a salamander, a lizard-like amphibian:

Frankly, that’s the most un-salamandery salamander I’ve ever seen, but nevertheless the name stuck.

But did Gerry’s gerrymandering work? It certainly did. At the 1812 election, the senate remained in his party’s hands. Gerry himself, however, lost his seat—but went on to serve as Vice President under James Madison the following year.

Limerick

Look up the origin of the word limerick and there’s a good chance you’ll be pointed in the direction of the the English poet Edward Lear. Best known for writing The Owl and The Pussycat, in 1846 Lear published an aptly titled Book of Nonsense:

There was an Old Man who said, “Hush!
I perceive a young bird in this bush!”
When they said—“Is it small?”
He replied—“Not at all!
It is four times as big as the bush!”

Lear’s book contained more than 100 five-line poems just like this one, each of which relayed the consistently bizarre activities of a consistently bizarre parade of people, including “an Old Man of New York” (“who murdered himself with a fork”), “a Young Lady of Ryde” (“whose shoe-strings were seldom untied”), and “an Old Person of Ischia” (“whose conduct grew friskier and friskier”). The collection proved hugely popular, and soon Lear’s quirky five-line poems—with their jaunty rhythm and memorable AABBA rhyme scheme—soon became known as “Learic” verses.

King Lear

Over time the fairly clumsy word Learic drifted ever closer to one of its more easily pronounceable soundalikes—namely Limerick, a city and county in south-western Ireland—and eventually, this was this name that stuck. It’s a neat, if slightly flawed little story. The flaw being that it’s complete rubbish. 

For one thing, Lear didn’t invent the AABBA style of verse. That honour goes to the Italian Dominican friar and scholar Thomas Aquinas, who wrote this in the mid-thirteenth century:

Sit vitiorum meorum evacuatio
Concupiscentae et libidinis exterminatio,
Caritatis et patientiae,
Humilitatis et obedientiae,
Omniumque virtutum augmentatio.

Regrettably, Sit vitiorum meorum evacuatio is not the Latin for “There once was a girl from Nantucket”, as Aquinas’s poem was actually a prayer:

Let it be for the elimination for my sins,

For the expulsion of the desire and lust,

For the increase of charity and patience,

Humility and obedience,

As well as all virtue.

Aquinas didn’t call his poem a limerick of course—but then again, neither did Lear. Another problem with the “Learic” explanation is that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word limerick didn’t appear in print until 1896, eight years after Lear’s death, when the author and artist Aubrey Beardsley wrote a letter to a friend to say that he had been trying “to amuse myself by writing limericks on my troubles”.

The limerick Beardsley came up with, inspired by a painting of St Rose of Lima, is far, FAR too indecent to reprint here. After all, there might be children reading this. But if you’re in the mood to be scandalized, you can read the original (alongside Beardsley’s accompanying illustration) here. Seriously—you have been warned...

But self-defiling Peruvian saints aside (you really want to know what that limerick says now, don’t you?) Beardsley tellingly used the word limerick in his letter without any accompanying explanation or context, suggesting the word was already well known by the time he came to use it. Could Learic have transformed into limerick in such a short period of time? It’s unlikely.

Sir James Murray: OED CEO

So where did the name come from? Well, according to Sir James Murray—founding editor of the OED, no less—the word actually derives from an old drinking song, once popular among troops in the British army, that apparently required all those taking part to make up their own verse, one person after another. Each verse was an improvised five-line poem, following an AABBA rhyme scheme, and was typically witty, nonsensical, satirical, or indecent in nature. And in between all of these spur-of-the-moment verses, the entire group would join together for the chorus, “Will you come up to Limerick?”. 

The game was probably based on an even earlier Irish jig called Will You Come Down To Limerick?, or Kitty Come Down To Limerick, which is still performed—albeit without the indecent lyrics—today. 

Poppycock

Something smells a bit iffy about poppycock.

People have been using it to mean “nonsense” or “useless blather” since the early 1800s, when it first began to appear in the colloquial English of the northeast United States. But how did it get there in the first place? 

According to several online sources—including the Merriam-Webster Dictionary—poppycock is a corruption of the Dutch word pappekak, a compound of pap, meaning “soft, chewed up food”, and kak, meaning, well, “cack”. Put together, pappekak, as the Oxford English Dictionary so eloquently explains, means something along the lines of “excrement as soft as porridge”. And on that basis it’s easy to see how the word came to describe something of little value.

Might be worth considering a rebrand...

But as the OED also points out, “no such word appears to be attested in Dutch”. That is to say, pappekak is a linguistic conjecture, a word only presumed to exist by keen etymologists clutching for possible origins of poppycock. So if porridgey poop isn’t quite right (which it isn’t in more ways than one, certainly), then what is?

Bizarrely, a more plausible explanation is that poppycock comes from the Dutch poppekak, meaning “doll excrement”. As odd as that might sound, poppekak is actually a genuine Dutch word attested in an old idiomatic phrase—zo fijn als gemalen poppekak, or “as fine as powdered doll’s excrement”—once used to describe someone showing what the OED calls “excessive religious zeal.”

So we can only presume that Dutch immigrants arriving in America in the early 1800s brought this peculiar expression with them. There, poppekak eventually morphed into poppycock and, perhaps through association with the pulpit-thumping preachers of the time, ultimately came to mean “empty prattle”, “claptrap”, and “nonsense”.

Bunkum

The fact that there’s any kind of etymological connection between politics and long-winded speeches (or, for that matter, between politics and a word meaning “complete nonsense”) might come as little surprise. But the fact is that bunkum owes its existence to a tediously lengthy political speech delivered by US Congressman Felix Walker in 1820.

Born in Virginia in 1753, Walker was elected to Congress in 1817 as representative for Buncombe County, North Carolina. He spent a total of six years in the House, during which time Congress was tasked with debating the so-called Missouri Question—namely, whether the territory of Missouri should be admitted into the Union as a free or a slave state—in late 1819.

The debate rumbled on for several inconclusive months, until finally, just before the decisive vote was due to be taken, Congressman Walker stood to address the house on 25 February 1820. 

He went on to deliver a lengthy, rambling, and largely irrelevant 5,000-word speech—which, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, you can now torture yourself with here; to put that into perspective, Walker’s speech is around 1,000 words longer than the entire role of Hamlet. 

Felix Walker, inventor of the cure for insomnia

Walker’s speech went on and on and on. And on. And on. His exasperated colleagues repeatedly shouted him down and yelled at him to desist, but, undeterred, he continued talking and proudly explained that he was not, “speaking to the House, but to Buncombe.” 

Out of everything that he said that day, it was this pithy explanation that proved to be the most significant. Soon, saying or doing something “for Buncombe” slipped into American slang to mean “doing something purely to please other people”, and the mid-1800s, it was being so widely used that its original spelling Buncombe was lost, and it was the newly-simplified bunkum that ultimately became a byword for political claptrap, empty promises, and eventually utter nonsense. 

The clipped form bunk followed in the early 1900s, and we’ve been debunking things since 1923. 

Felix Walker, meanwhile, is now commemorated on a plaque in his home county of Buncombe for, quite rightly, giving a “new meaning to the word.”