mark my words ...

Keyes, Ralph. The Hidden History of Coined Words. Oxford University Press, 2021.  

    This much welcome tome is a delightful survey, focusing on new or rogue words’ often deceptive and complex origins. (Even Shakespeare, often credited as the ne plus ultra among creators of new words, hundreds, even thousands of them, was in truth more a conduit and discoverer of words that already existed rather than a creator of novel ones). There’s pretty much something juicy on every page of Hidden History, and as a result it’s a joy to linger over the contents, which are perhaps better inhaled in small amounts – the (sub)chapters are of modest length, a page or two usually. I especially liked the chapter titled ‘Nonstarters’ which, as the title suggests, focuses on coinages that, for whatever reason, didn’t catch on.

    Also commendable is the Notes section which lists in somewhat excruciating detail the sources, though it would have been helpful if the citings had been better identified, i.e. with page numbers or actual footnote references. More successful is the detailed and much welcome index, the lack of which would have been criminal in a book like this. I say this because it’s impossible not to notice the disconcerting trend of index-less nonfiction books these days, a sign of the times perhaps. But as the man said, don’t get me started.

    While many of the usual suspects are present in Hidden History, gathered and presented in the nicely concise chapters, the necessarily selective nature of such a broad brushstroke compendium will inspire some head scratching. To wit, some of my favorites, seemingly obvious choices I dare say, didn’t make the cut: blonde bombshell, Wagnerian, slippery slope, ass-kicking, film noir, camp, campy, high camp, cult classic, stream-of-consciousness, cloak and dagger, Orwellian [1], hit-man, gumshoe, under-the-radar, scapegoat, fall guy, apparatchik, do-it-yourself, schlock, schlockmeister, B movie, mole, dish, blown away, auteur, pulp fiction, exploitation film, blacksploitation, anything by Raymond Chandler [2], to cite some of the more conspicuous absences.

    In similar fashion, I would have preferred greater emphasis on the ubiquitous influence of the movies on world coinages. Ditto for cyberspeak [3], especially the text shortcuts and acronyms, which receive rather short shrift. I was also disappointed that there was no mention of language maven John Simon (even in the extensive reading list), who had a special antipathy to word coinages. On the positive side I was delighted to see good coverage of Milton, Dickens, Kipling, Damon Runyan, Lewis Carroll, Dr. Seuss, Walter Winchell, the Alsop brothers, and various other luminaries, literary and otherwise.

    Ultimately one may object to what he includes, emphasizes, or leaves out, but make no mistake, Ralph Keyes is one fine writer, and his smoothly readable prose makes Hidden History a fun read and rare treat for wordaholics and language buffs.

  [1] Orwell does get a paragraph which discusses 1984-inspired coinages, but the term Orwellian is nowhere to be found.

  [2] Not so surprising, there’s a substantial section on the creation and evolution of the word google, along with the word’s metamorphosis into the capitalized Google of the all-too-familiar company and search engine we know today by the same name. However, there’s no mention of the ever-impish Raymond Chandler’s appropriation of the term. Contrary to some accounts, Chandler didn’t invent the word. Indeed, Keyes’s tome lists citings as far back as 1913, when ‘google’ was used to describe a monster in a children’s story.
    But as regards Chandler, in a letter to his agent H.N. Swanson, March 14, 1953, Chandler parodies science fiction novels with his usual trenchant wit:

    "… the sudden brightness swung me round and the Fourth Moon had already risen. I had exactly four seconds to hot up the disintegrator and Google had told me it wasn’t enough."

    The ‘Google’ in this ditty is presumably some kind of intelligent entity. However, and as much as Chandler has aged well, it’s certain he didn’t foresee the search engine/mega-company that emerged nearly a half century later. Whether the ‘Google’ of Chandler’s story is human, human-like, cyborg or replicant remains a little vague. 

   [3] The term cyberspeak actually appears, in passing, in the aforementioned Orwell paragraph, but technology and -like coinages are in short supply.