Words
The Words of Dickens
Tuesday, 7 February, is the 200th anniversary of the birth of
Charles Dickens. It has been impossible to avoid knowing about this
impending event for several months because of way that the British
media has anticipated it, with its usual concern to get ahead of its
competitors. Boredom has set in for many British readers and
viewers, few of whom these days read him.
I was going to pass over it in silence, not wanting particularly to
add to the hoopla. But then, in an idle moment of curiosity, I fired
up the Oxford English Dictionary to learn more about the linguistic
legacy the man has left us. He wrote such delightful and insightful
descriptions of London and its people that I wondered if his verbal
inventiveness matched his artistic abilities.
Dickens is highly rated by the OED. He is the 13th most frequently
quoted source, well ahead of his contemporaries, though this may in
part reflect his extraordinary output rather than his creativity.
Among the 9,218 quotations from his works in the OED, 265 words and
compounds are cited as having been first used by him in print and
another 1,586 as having been used in a new sense.
Life’s too short to look at them all; let’s concentrate on the 265
new words and phrases. He’s credited with inventing such standard
English terms as “boredom”, “flummox”, “rampage”, “butter-fingers”,
“tousled”, “sawbones”, “confusingly”, “casualty ward”, “allotment
garden”, “kibosh”, “footlights”, “dustbin”, “fingerless”, “fairy
story”, “messiness”, “natural-looking”, “squashed”, “spectacularly”
and “tintack”.
Anybody who cites these based on the OED’s evidence risks being
regarded as out of touch. Most of the entries haven’t been revised
since they were compiled a century ago. Our etymological knowledge
has improved greatly since then and has had a huge boost from the
introduction of searchable digitised archives. I trawled the British
Library’s archive of nineteenth-century newspapers to check how
original these words really were. A lot weren’t.
“Boredom”, for example, which Dickens included in Bleak House in
1853, is known from the Theatrical Examiner of April 1841; he used
“casualty ward” in Sketches by Boz in 1836 but it’s known from
Jackson’s Oxford Journal dated January 1825; “footlights” is in the
same work but is earlier in the Morning Chronicle of December 1822;
“natural-looking” is likewise from Sketches by Boz but a Mr T Hood
advertised “natural-looking wigs” in the Morning Post a quarter of a
century earlier, in November 1810; “confusingly”, from a letter of
May 1863, is in the Morning Post of February 1852; “sharp practice”
comes from The Pickwick Papers of 1837 but is trumped by The Bury
and Norwich Post of February 1810; “fairy story”, which Dickens
included in David Copperfield as an alternative to the older “fairy-
tale”, may be found in the London Standard in December 1827;
“snobbish”, in The Old Curiosity Shop of 1841, appears likewise in
the London Standard, in May 1836; “kibosh”, also from The Pickwick
Papers, has been backdated several years by recent careful research
(see my piece at http://wwwords.org?KBSH
).
Other terms are certainly his to claim, including “butter-fingers”,
“sawbones”, “messiness”, “spiflication”, “whizz-bang”, “seediness”,
and “unpromisingly”. “Flummox” appears in The Pickwick Papers of
1837 but was also included by James Halliwell-Phillipps in his
Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words in 1846 - it seems that
Dickens breathed new life into an old dialect word. “Tousled”, as
“touzled”, is in Dombey & Son of 1848, but appeared four years
before in the Manchester Times and Gazette of December 1844;
however, this is in a story with the title Trotty Veck and the Nor’-
Wester, by one Charles Dickens, so he has neatly antedated himself.
None of this detracts from Dickens’s skill in using language. He is
the first recorder of many items of slang (one contemporary critic
called him the professor of slang), which he didn’t invent but which
his sharp ear for colloquial speech lovingly noted. In other cases
he popularised colloquial terms that might without him have died
out, such as “kibosh” and “devil-may-care”. He had a trick of making
new compound adjectives from existing words that concisely expressed
a thought: “angry-eyed”, “hunger-worn”, “proud-stomached”, “fancy-
dressed”, “coffee-imbibing” and “ginger-beery”, as well as new
compound nouns such as “copying-clerk” and “crossing-sweeper”.
As these examples show, we must always be sceptical of claims about
who invented a word. Deeper digging often demonstrates that others
had got to them first. But nobody is going to be less attracted by
Dickens through knowing that.
3 months ago
Charles Dickens. It has been impossible to avoid knowing about this
impending event for several months because of way that the British
media has anticipated it, with its usual concern to get ahead of its
competitors. Boredom has set in for many British readers and
viewers, few of whom these days read him.
I was going to pass over it in silence, not wanting particularly to
add to the hoopla. But then, in an idle moment of curiosity, I fired
up the Oxford English Dictionary to learn more about the linguistic
legacy the man has left us. He wrote such delightful and insightful
descriptions of London and its people that I wondered if his verbal
inventiveness matched his artistic abilities.
Dickens is highly rated by the OED. He is the 13th most frequently
quoted source, well ahead of his contemporaries, though this may in
part reflect his extraordinary output rather than his creativity.
Among the 9,218 quotations from his works in the OED, 265 words and
compounds are cited as having been first used by him in print and
another 1,586 as having been used in a new sense.
Life’s too short to look at them all; let’s concentrate on the 265
new words and phrases. He’s credited with inventing such standard
English terms as “boredom”, “flummox”, “rampage”, “butter-fingers”,
“tousled”, “sawbones”, “confusingly”, “casualty ward”, “allotment
garden”, “kibosh”, “footlights”, “dustbin”, “fingerless”, “fairy
story”, “messiness”, “natural-looking”, “squashed”, “spectacularly”
and “tintack”.
Anybody who cites these based on the OED’s evidence risks being
regarded as out of touch. Most of the entries haven’t been revised
since they were compiled a century ago. Our etymological knowledge
has improved greatly since then and has had a huge boost from the
introduction of searchable digitised archives. I trawled the British
Library’s archive of nineteenth-century newspapers to check how
original these words really were. A lot weren’t.
“Boredom”, for example, which Dickens included in Bleak House in
1853, is known from the Theatrical Examiner of April 1841; he used
“casualty ward” in Sketches by Boz in 1836 but it’s known from
Jackson’s Oxford Journal dated January 1825; “footlights” is in the
same work but is earlier in the Morning Chronicle of December 1822;
“natural-looking” is likewise from Sketches by Boz but a Mr T Hood
advertised “natural-looking wigs” in the Morning Post a quarter of a
century earlier, in November 1810; “confusingly”, from a letter of
May 1863, is in the Morning Post of February 1852; “sharp practice”
comes from The Pickwick Papers of 1837 but is trumped by The Bury
and Norwich Post of February 1810; “fairy story”, which Dickens
included in David Copperfield as an alternative to the older “fairy-
tale”, may be found in the London Standard in December 1827;
“snobbish”, in The Old Curiosity Shop of 1841, appears likewise in
the London Standard, in May 1836; “kibosh”, also from The Pickwick
Papers, has been backdated several years by recent careful research
(see my piece at http://wwwords.org?KBSH
Other terms are certainly his to claim, including “butter-fingers”,
“sawbones”, “messiness”, “spiflication”, “whizz-bang”, “seediness”,
and “unpromisingly”. “Flummox” appears in The Pickwick Papers of
1837 but was also included by James Halliwell-Phillipps in his
Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words in 1846 - it seems that
Dickens breathed new life into an old dialect word. “Tousled”, as
“touzled”, is in Dombey & Son of 1848, but appeared four years
before in the Manchester Times and Gazette of December 1844;
however, this is in a story with the title Trotty Veck and the Nor’-
Wester, by one Charles Dickens, so he has neatly antedated himself.
None of this detracts from Dickens’s skill in using language. He is
the first recorder of many items of slang (one contemporary critic
called him the professor of slang), which he didn’t invent but which
his sharp ear for colloquial speech lovingly noted. In other cases
he popularised colloquial terms that might without him have died
out, such as “kibosh” and “devil-may-care”. He had a trick of making
new compound adjectives from existing words that concisely expressed
a thought: “angry-eyed”, “hunger-worn”, “proud-stomached”, “fancy-
dressed”, “coffee-imbibing” and “ginger-beery”, as well as new
compound nouns such as “copying-clerk” and “crossing-sweeper”.
As these examples show, we must always be sceptical of claims about
who invented a word. Deeper digging often demonstrates that others
had got to them first. But nobody is going to be less attracted by
Dickens through knowing that.
