Well I'll be Darned!

Read a good piece in The Guardian this morning on the origin of words - not all of them - just a few of the quirkier ones invented by fiction writers. Like for example - chortle - a cross between 'snort' and 'chuckle' as penned by Lewis Carroll in Through The Looking Glass. Butterfingers comes courtesy of Dickens in The Pickwick Papers, penned in 1836. Microcomputer was first coined by Isaac Asimov in the July 1955 edition of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and we have John Le Carré to thank for honey trap which debuted in his classic Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in 1974. I particularly like the origins of Work in Progress which Ford Madox Ford used in the context of a not yet completed artistic work when describing the snippets from Ulysses that he published in The Transatlantic Review. There are bucket loads more (meme, tightwad, nerd, factoid, litterbug... ) in a piece that's well worth a goosey, goosey as you sip your lunchtime cocktails on this sunniest day of days. The article is extracted from Paul Dickson's book: Extracted from Authorisms: Words Wrought by Authors.



In a word - perbtastic!